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Fetterman's up +23 over Lamb in the PA primary for the U.S. Senate, but it's the undecided voters who make up a plurality a little over a month before the election. The GOP race is wide open, with a majority of voters undecided: quote:A new Emerson College Polling/The Hill Poll finds the Republican Senate primary wide open as Senator Pat Toomey (R) retires from office: 51% of voters are undecided and David McCormick and Mehmet Oz receive 14% respectively. No other candidate reaches double digits. Similarly, in the race for Governor, 49% of Republican primary voters are undecided, while Doug Mastriano holds 16% and Lou Barletta 12%. The National Organization for Women has endorsed Lamb for the primary.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:03
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NBC has an article following the U.S. Treasury and FBI Report that romance scams have more than tripled in the last 5 years and Americans collectively lost over $1 billion to romance scammers last year. The basic story of romance scams for the last 30 years is the same: "lonely dumb people + everyone is online now," but the addition of crypto has caused the scams to explode because scammers are harder to catch and banks/credit cards/gift card processors have started implementing anti-scam rules that halt suspicious transactions that crypto platforms do not. There is also some speculation that loneliness from the pandemic has contributed to the spike. That makes sense and is probably pretty likely, but the spike started before the pandemic and basically tracks with the rise of crypto, so it is likely that the bulk of it was not from the pandemic. https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1511001662130999302 quote:How a fake online romance cost one man almost $300,000
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Apr 4, 2022 16:33
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Willa Rogers posted:This paragraph isolated from the rest of your post could be talking about either a Trump rally or about Democrats talking about a Trump rally. Yeah. It's even more pronounced in places that are adjacent to reality like twitter or forums. I just think it's interesting to see how memetic thought propagates, and I think it's one of the biggest challenges any social movement faces going forward. On some level I think the people-as-brands are already aware of it, but it tends to lead to people waxing elitist and lauding their presumed moral superiority over the perceived failings of other people instead of anything actually useful. That sentence got away from me a little. But I think everyone here knows what I mean? That thing where people take the most illogically parsed and uncharitable reading of whatever someone is saying to make a point in their own favor? I think some of that is spurred by FOMO/loss-aversion, and so people are incentivized to pounce on other people to build their credibility as thought leaders or ... something like that. It's a half-formed idea. 
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Apr 4, 2022 16:33
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Crypto has no access controls, no coordinating authority, and no possibility of clawback, so it's literally the ideal scam medium. You might as well pay someone by wadding up a bunch of cash and throwing it out the window at them
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Apr 4, 2022 16:36
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Ershalim posted:Yeah. It's even more pronounced in places that are adjacent to reality like twitter or forums. I just think it's interesting to see how memetic thought propagates, and I think it's one of the biggest challenges any social movement faces going forward. On some level I think the people-as-brands are already aware of it, but it tends to lead to people waxing elitist and lauding their presumed moral superiority over the perceived failings of other people instead of anything actually useful. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes, the DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture. They are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair: all memes, all passed on. Come post about Kojima in the Kojima thread. I'm gonna post about Kojima's meme theory later this week after buffing up on a few of his essays on memes.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:40
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haveblue posted:Crypto has no access controls, no coordinating authority, and no possibility of clawback, so it's literally the ideal scam medium. You might as well pay someone by wadding up a bunch of cash and throwing it out the window at them I know someone who got scammed out of their rental deposit by sending money to a scammers crypto wallet (they convinced the friend is was an AirBnB link, but it was instructions for adding money to their wallet). There is zero recourse for getting the money back. It is like throwing it into a black hole, as far as your local police are concerned.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:40
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:NBC has an article following the U.S. Treasury and FBI Report that romance scams have more than tripled in the last 5 years and Americans collectively lost over $1 billion to romance scammers last year. The basic story of romance scams for the last 30 years is the same: "lonely dumb people + everyone is online now," but the addition of crypto has caused the scams to explode because scammers are harder to catch and banks/credit cards/gift card processors have started implementing anti-scam rules that halt suspicious transactions that crypto platforms do not. quote:“The victims who are involved in these scams, they’re losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to even millions of dollars,” said Nofziger. “If you think it will never happen to you, you’re wrong. It can and it will, and I guarantee you someone in your inner circle right now is the victim of a scam.”  Also, as a Tinder/Bumble user, some of these profiles are so blatantly obvious that it's hard to generate much in the way of sympathy for folks who get nabbed by them.
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Apr 4, 2022 16:44
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Jizz Festival posted:So fascinating. This was indeed an event that happened, and is current. I'm curious, though, what is it that you find interesting about this story? Are you actually surprised that a supportive crowd went along with something even though it was stupid? I think it's interesting because the conventional wisdom is that politicians have to be in tune with all these little local things, and doing a faux pas by eating a specialty local cuisine wrong or mis-pronouncing some beloved regional business name would devastate their chances in the area. Like so many other conventional political wisdoms, though, it's something that Trump is barging straight through without a problem. Is it a special Trump thing? Or is it another manifestation of the "all politics is national" trend of the 21st century, with these big country-level partisan politics increasingly wiping out that kind of local/regional flavor? Or was it just always bullshit invented by the political media to drive controversy, and no one dared to challenge it until now?
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Apr 4, 2022 16:59
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Abner Assington posted:Also, as a Tinder/Bumble user, some of these profiles are so blatantly obvious that it's hard to generate much in the way of sympathy for folks who get nabbed by them. This is actually the point of them being obvious like that, it’s a self-filtering scam. Anyone who gets past the obvious fake poo poo and still interacts with the scammer is a lot more likely to start sending over money. It’s a barrier of entry for people with more than two brain cells
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Apr 4, 2022 17:04
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Abner Assington posted:Bad news, Amy, but millennials and younger generations aren't going to have hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of dollars to get swindled with Millennials as a generation will definitely have enough people to get scammed out of that much money. Millennials actually have higher inflation adjusted earnings than Boomers did when they were the same age, but the cost of housing, school, and healthcare outpace the increased earnings. So, a portion of them will have even more disposable income than Boomers. I would assume that fewer Millennials are being scammed due to age/technology/cryptocurrency familiarity. But, I bet in 40 years that Generation Theta will be laughing about how their Millennial Great-Grandpa keeps getting scammed on the Metaverse Hololink because he never learned how to use it growing up.
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Apr 4, 2022 17:07
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Abner Assington posted:Bad news, Amy, but millennials and younger generations aren't going to have hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of dollars to get swindled with My GF's best friend's dad has been this person for us. Dude got taken hard, cashed out over half of his retirement, and nearly got to the point of alienating every family member and friend he has trying to claw money from them to send to his "girlfriend". They even started tacking on other scams like "Oh I'm also a trust fund heiress and just need you to launder....I mean hold my money I'll send it to you via DHL OOPS I accidentally left $40 million in gold nuggets in the case with the cash and the UK border guards want a bribe of $200,000 to let it go". It was insane and even lead to so many other family destroying revelations about his finances and how he structured things. Dude's lucky as gently caress to not be a 70 year old tossed out on his rear end by everyone who once loved him into the cold.
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Apr 4, 2022 17:17
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Generation Theta will be laughing about how Millennial Great-Grandpa was eaten by robowolves because his fire went out, and that’s if we’re lucky
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Apr 4, 2022 17:28
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Main Paineframe posted:I think it's interesting because the conventional wisdom is that politicians have to be in tune with all these little local things, and doing a faux pas by eating a specialty local cuisine wrong or mis-pronouncing some beloved regional business name would devastate their chances in the area. Other politicians up until then thought the path to power was to keep the hatred and bigotry on the down-low while playing all these games. Trump figured out the braying hogs at his trough just want to be granted social validation for being the biggest, most hateful assholes possible towards their targeted minority of choice. Other politicians are learning this lesson so it will be a much bigger part of the right wing of the country going forward. He was just the trailblazer proving conventional wisdom wrong.
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Apr 4, 2022 17:43
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bird food bathtub posted:Other politicians up until then thought the path to power was to keep the hatred and bigotry on the down-low while playing all these games. Trump figured out the braying hogs at his trough just want to be granted social validation for being the biggest, most hateful assholes possible towards their targeted minority of choice. it's also, and this is critical, something that republican politicians can deliver to their base. stupid, hateful, and doesn't help anyone, but it is an issue where republican politicians can say "vote for me, and I will deliver this thing on your behalf." it will only draw in awful people, but those awful people will receive something in exchange for their efforts. theoretically the democratic party should be able to retaliate with 'vote for us, and we will pass laws protecting you from these people," but, well. civil rights in general, and voting rights in specific, proved just too gosh-darned divisive for a party with a trifecta to deliver on. and so, instead, the message going into the midterms is "vote for us, and we will tell you that no, really, NEXT time we have a trifecta we'll do something with it."
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Apr 4, 2022 17:53
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Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch taking a position that is too embarrassing even for ACB, Kavanaugh, and Roberts. If you read the dissents, they have slightly different takes on it, but all of them essentially argue that the fourth amendment only protects you from unreasonable search and seizure in relation to the crime and criminal statute; and does not have any malicious prosecution component. So, if a cop makes up child porn charges because he personally hates you, if he can convince at least one prosecutor that it was legit, then the person has no recourse if it comes out that the charge was made up by the cop, because it was an appropriate search and seizure under the assumption that he really did have child porn. https://twitter.com/stevenmazie/status/1510981541500968975
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Apr 4, 2022 18:25
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Millennials actually have higher inflation adjusted earnings than Boomers did when they were the same age, but the cost of housing, school, and healthcare outpace the increased earnings. Good news you have higher inflation adjusted earnings but due to price increases they won't buy as much  Willa Rogers posted:“For God’s sake, how did we get to the point where ... the base voters are so mad about two of our own senators, rather than Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and Jan. 6? That is a tremendously mismanaged situation,” he added. Just incredible. Ok we spent 18 months telling everyone about all the good poo poo we can't do even though we promised because two Democrats said 'no', why is everyone more angry at the two people in our party blocking everything right now than at the gotdang cheeto ex-president???
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Apr 4, 2022 18:26
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bird food bathtub posted:Other politicians up until then thought the path to power was to keep the hatred and bigotry on the down-low while playing all these games. Trump figured out the braying hogs at his trough just want to be granted social validation for being the biggest, most hateful assholes possible towards their targeted minority of choice. Literally laughing at the idea of Trump raising an army of hatred toward Meijer shoppers.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:28
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VitalSigns posted:Then they...don't have higher inflation adjusted earnings Yes, they do. You're mixing up inflation adjusted earnings with real income. They have higher inflation adjusted earnings, but lower real income.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:28
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Yes, they do. You're mixing up inflation adjusted earnings with real income. Those are the same thing, the purpose of inflation adjustment is to translate nominal wages into real wages You cannot have the same inflation adjusted wages and lower real wages it makes no sense.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:31
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch taking a position that is too embarrassing even for ACB, Kavanaugh, and Roberts. Gorsuch is becoming an actual wildcard that feels almost completely unpredictable.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:33
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Yawgmoft posted:Gorsuch is becoming an actual wildcard that feels almost completely unpredictable. Let's hope he cuts the brake lines on the van with the other conservatives in it
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Apr 4, 2022 18:36
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VitalSigns posted:Then they...don't have higher inflation adjusted earnings There is more that goes into inflation than just those things. For example, school costs have easily outpaced inflation over the past decade: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/tuition-fees-continues-rise-pandemic-inflation-woes-hit-colleges-rcna14292 quote:Students and their families had been largely enjoying a break from such shocks. College costs outpaced inflation by 28 percent at public institutions and 19 percent at private nonprofit ones in the decade preceding the pandemic, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For reference of millennials having more income than boomers, here's personal median income over the years adjusted for inflation. I know this isn't exactly 1:1 based on age, but I figured this is good enough to show the trend over a couple of generations.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:39
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VitalSigns posted:Those are the same thing, the purpose of inflation adjustment is to translate nominal wages into real wages The price of housing and healthcare does not = general inflation. Inflation did not rise ~200% over 20 years when the price of tuition did. Inflation was actually very low during that time! You're mixing up inflation with price increases and inflation adjusted income with purchasing power. The average person can have higher inflation adjusted income, but lower purchasing power because the price of specific commodities went way up, but the actual monetary value of the dollar only went up a little during the same period.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:40
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Yawgmoft posted:Gorsuch is becoming an actual wildcard that feels almost completely unpredictable. 90% of the time (including this case) you can predict Gorsuch's opinion with "Where does it literally say X word in the law/constitution?" His dissent is basically, "The words "malicious prosecution" appear nowhere in the 4th amendment, therefore I rule against."
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Apr 4, 2022 18:42
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The price of housing and healthcare does not = general inflation. I'm aware of how academically inflation is covered but not including things like "living" and "shelter" into does point at a problem in how it's quantified, eh?
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Apr 4, 2022 18:42
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Jaxyon posted:I'm aware of how academically inflation is covered but not including things like "living" and "shelter" into does point at a problem in how it's quantified, eh? Healthcare and housing are included in inflation measures, but they aren't the only thing. Inflation specifically measures the uniform devaluation of a currency. If I make the same amount of money, but move somewhere where housing is much cheaper, then I didn't reduce inflation. Purchasing power, real disposable income, and other measures exist specifically to determine the relative amount of goods an individual can purchase with all factors included.
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Apr 4, 2022 18:45
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Here's the official weighting they use to calculate total inflation with CPI right now. There are other measures that weigh different things, but CPI is usually what you hear as the "topline inflation" rate. Housing is the single largest factor they measure when calculating inflation by a large margin. 
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Apr 4, 2022 18:55
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Lib and let die posted:Wait, I thought you were on the northwest side of the Everglades why are you describing my neighborhood just north of Miami? NE Florida. Saint Augustine Which is rapidly turning into Daytona. It sucks. The conservatives and rednecks here used to be of the Jimmy Buffet variety who liked to fish; Aquanecks. Now they're more the Hank Williams/Toby Keith types who love slapping a giant flag on everything while seeing how big and loud they can make their trucks. They're massively overdeveloping here and it's really pissing of the locals. Funny thing, when you start building 4 story hotels all over the place but don't address the roads or the infrastructure, somehow magically traffic seems to double! There's a ton of vacant retail property here but I see new buildings going up everywhere and it's usually the same sort of tenants that move in. Cheesy beach stores, pizza places, lovely Chinese food and stuff like that. There are also supposed to be height restrictions for new building projects but somehow they're getting around it (bribery) I really enjoyed the flea market (sold land to build a hospital), the thrift stores (cause I'm broke) and the consignment shops (because I could unload my kid's old toys and clothes easily and also buy him "new" ones). I'm just still surprised to see the Dollar stores closing since so many people I know are shopping there a LOT. People trying to stretch their dollars now more than ever.
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Apr 4, 2022 19:15
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The Covid funding that was stripped out of the continuing resolution a month ago is going to be passed on its own as a separate bill at the very last second before the money ran out. But, in order to do that, they had to strip out all of the money to donate vaccines to the third world. Finally doing the right thing that should have just been a normal non-issue at the last second and at the expense of non-Americans is the most American way to solve problems. https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1511010331295989775
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Apr 4, 2022 19:17
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Edit: Double posted somehow despite the 10 second timer.
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Apr 4, 2022 19:17
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The price of housing and healthcare does not = general inflation. Then the inflation adjustment you're using isn't weighted correctly because you aren't ending up with an accurate comparison of real wages
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Apr 4, 2022 19:18
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Wasn't it $15 billion in covid funds a few days ago? Is the $5 billion the global response that isn't happening?
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Apr 4, 2022 19:20
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haveblue posted:Wasn't it $15 billion in covid funds a few days ago? Is the $5 billion the global response that isn't happening? Yes. The $5 billion was for purchasing and donating vaccines and to pay for USAID to send people to administer those vaccinations in countries without the infrastructure or organization to do so. quote:Senate negotiators, including Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), were seeking a compromise with Democrats, after lawmakers could not agree on a $15 billion package that would have included about $10 billion in domestic funding and $5 billion for the international response.
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Apr 4, 2022 19:22
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VitalSigns posted:Then the inflation adjustment you're using isn't weighted correctly because you aren't ending up with an accurate comparison of real wages You should probably take that up with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, not LT2012.
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Apr 4, 2022 19:23
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:90% of the time (including this case) you can predict Gorsuch's opinion with "Where does it literally say X word in the law/constitution?"
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Apr 4, 2022 19:23
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Kalit posted:You should probably take that up with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, not LT2012. People have I'm just pointing it out here because it was an exceptionally silly use of their methodology
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Apr 4, 2022 19:28
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VitalSigns posted:Then the inflation adjustment you're using isn't weighted correctly because you aren't ending up with an accurate comparison of real wages VitalSigns posted:People have You're still mixing up inflation adjusted wages with purchasing power. It is possible for inflation to go up mildly, but college tuition to go up massively simultaneously. A student's inflation adjusted earnings would be unchanged whether he spent $12,000 per year on tuition or not. But, his individual purchasing power would go down. They are two different measures and individual circumstances can change purchasing power without changing inflation. The vast majority of people are not currently paying college tuition. So, the overall impact on inflation would be small despite the impact on an individual's purchasing power being very large. You could also move to a different geographic location or university and experience a price change that is not inflation. If I go to a cheaper 4-year school, then I didn't reduce inflation overall or among education. It has to be an across the board increase in the baseline value. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 19:46
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Well most Millennials are no longer in school (how old do you think Millennials are), but yes if a student's tuition goes up that is inflation. If you aren't including tuition in your inflation calculation, that doesn't mean they didn't experience inflation, it means your calculated rate isn't accurate for that person. Inflation is different for different people and in different parts of the country. The CPI is controversial and has a lot of issues (a big one is the effect of Moore's law: you can get terabytes of hard drive storage for a couple hundred bucks, which would have cost millions in 1980, does this mean that every family has millions of dollars more effective purchasing power now? No, because probably zero families were spending millions of dollars on massive home hard drives in the 80s) Not understanding this is how you get to nonsense conclusions like real wages are up but they can't buy as much as they used to VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 20:22
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BiggerBoat posted:I really enjoyed the flea market (sold land to build a hospital), the thrift stores (cause I'm broke) and the consignment shops (because I could unload my kid's old toys and clothes easily and also buy him "new" ones). I'm just still surprised to see the Dollar stores closing since so many people I know are shopping there a LOT. People trying to stretch their dollars now more than ever. Are they aware of how strong our economy is? https://twitter.com/VP/status/1509941158742437897 https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1510408494628941825 This is why messaging is so important. If people are trying to stretch their dollars in the midst of our ever stronger economy, then there's clearly something they don't understand. Hopefully someone can explain it to them.
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Apr 4, 2022 20:30
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:You're still mixing up inflation adjusted wages with purchasing power. Purchasing power and inflation adjusted wages are the same thing, however constructing the proper inflation basket is a never ending matter of dispute.
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Apr 4, 2022 20:31
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