HonorableTB posted:

You're comparing Seattle City Light, a taxpayer subsidized municipal utility, with privatized electric. Look up the rates for Georgia Power and get back to me.

I am a Seattleite, I know how this works. SCL is billed bimonthly and routinely 50-60% less than the average cost of a non-municipal utility. More Americans are served by private electric utilities than aren't. SCL specifically receives taxpayer and state funding subsidies to keep costs of utilities low for those who are covered under it. SCL also ONLY covers Seattle city limits, which covers less than half of the Seattle-Tacoma metro population. Much more is covered by Puget Sound Energy than not, which is substantially more expensive than SCL.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

what do you even have to do to hit a 1k utility bill?

are you running an aluminum recycling operation in your back yard?

HonorableTB posted:

You're comparing Seattle City Light, a taxpayer subsidized municipal utility, with privatized electric. Look up the rates for Georgia Power and get back to me.

I am a Seattleite, I know how this works. SCL is billed bimonthly and routinely 50-60% less than the average cost of a non-municipal utility. More Americans are served by private electric utilities than aren't. SCL specifically receives taxpayer and state funding subsidies to keep costs of utilities low for those who are covered under it. SCL also ONLY covers Seattle city limits, which covers less than half of the Seattle-Tacoma metro population. Much more is covered by Puget Sound Energy than not, which is substantially more expensive than SCL.

HonorableTB posted:

You're comparing Seattle City Light, a taxpayer subsidized municipal utility, with privatized electric. Look up the rates for Georgia Power and get back to me.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

MooselanderII posted:

Dude I'm still waiting to hear what the deal is with the pass through entity 20 percent deduction repeal you mentioned a few pages back that isn't mentioned in the article you linked, which instead refers to imposing a healthcare surcharge on investment income from pass through entities.

quote:

it is essentially a 3.8% increase in taxes on pass through income for people above $400k.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

I was explaining what pass through income is and my brain accidentally swapped the TCJA change instead because it was the most recent legislative change to section 119a instead of the Medicare investment tax. The next line correctly mentioned it, but I misnamed it in the line before:

MooselanderII posted:

The investment tax has nothing to do with 199A, it's not even in the income tax sections of the internal revenue code. It's its own thing.

Willa Rogers posted:

This is the most recent one I recall:

I recall another recent survey in which something like 50-60 percent of teens said they'd thought of suicide or self-harm, but I'll have to go digging for it.

Here's a KFF survey analysis on the effects of the pandemic on adults, including young adults.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Electric rates in Germany are almost 3x the kw/h of the U.S. The U.K. has about 2x.

The E.U. has fairly high electric and gas prices.

Canada is the only OECD country with cheaper electricity than the U.S.

DarkCrawler posted:

https://kion546.com/news/2022/07/07/governor-gavin-newsom-announces-california-will-make-its-own-insulin/

Looks like increasingly your quality of life depends more and more on the state you live in.

Jaxyon posted:

Not US, but former Japan PM Abe just got shot.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/japan-shinzo-abe-shot-rcna37228

Probably not going to make it.

Rough day for conservative PMs.

edit:

https://twitter.com/kyodo_english/status/1545242258240569344

silence_kit posted:

The goons in the D&D [Nuclear] Energy thread like to tout France's nuclear energy program, but electricity prices are like ~2x higher in France than in the US. The high cost of nuclear electricity might not matter a whole lot to the French--they may not really be that sensitive to electricity prices. When I think of countries which have a lot of heavy industry and use a lot of electricity, I don't think of France.

If you look at the US and China, which are countries which more meaningfully contribute to the global industrial economy, they aren't very heavily nuclear powered.

DarkCrawler posted:

https://kion546.com/news/2022/07/07/governor-gavin-newsom-announces-california-will-make-its-own-insulin/

Looks like increasingly your quality of life depends more and more on the state you live in.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Shinzo Abe is Japan's first gun-related homicide for the year.

The homicide rate by guns has technically been 0 in Japan almost every year for decades, because the rate is calculated by deaths per 100,000 people rounded to the nearest tenth, and the gun homicide rate has been less than 0.05 almost every year.

It is incredibly rare for it to happen and the fact that the one time it has this year is the country's most popular politician whose party was likely about to return to power is pretty insane.

Edit: For a dark and wild comparison, the gun homicide rate in the U.S. is 20,501.2% higher than Japan. That is over 20,000 PERCENT higher.

Meatball posted:

You're right. The next few years is going to see a lot of people moving states, especially with the increase of WFH tech, people have more latitude about where they live.

The logic of our current laws makes me think of a Sam Kinison joke: "I solved world hunger! All the hungry kids just need to move to where the food is!"

Meatball posted:

You're right. The next few years is going to see a lot of people moving states, especially with the increase of WFH tech, people have more latitude about where they live.

The logic of our current laws makes me think of a Sam Kinison joke: "I solved world hunger! All the hungry kids just need to move to where the food is!"

silence_kit posted:

Goons like to attribute the success of California to its state government policies, but California has so many natural and historical advantages that the CA state government would have had to greatly screw up for CA to transform into a poor state.

I maintain that CA's success has little to do with its state government and has more to do with things like: great weather/resultant bountiful agriculture, Stanford University/Department of Defense funding, the Gold Rush, the Southern California Oil Boom, etc.

FLIPADELPHIA posted:

One fewer ultra nationalist running around. Shame Hinckley wasn't as good a shot.

FlamingLiberal posted:

Yes the Supreme Court is just moving things back in time to the Articles of Confederation period, where the federal government essentially wasn’t allowed to do much and states were all like mini-countries

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

Finance stuff.

Boot and Rally posted:

What does Stanford have to to with the DoD?

Also, agriculture falls under "other" in terms of GDP for California. Everyone thinks it is huge, and it is, but not for California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#/media/File:California_GDP_by_sector_2017.png

bird food bathtub posted:

Is a possible explanation for it "real, actual people have been hammered by real, actual reality and all the numbers fuckery is fake anyway?" That's my gut reaction but I'm frequently wrong about that stuff.

Meatball posted:

You're right. The next few years is going to see a lot of people moving states, especially with the increase of WFH tech, people have more latitude about where they live.

Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:

It's actually the opposite. If we follow the historical example of GDP relationship to unemployment and inflation-price spirals, then people should be hurting more or the economy should be growing.

It could also be a really rare survey error that just happened to occur in this specific direction at this specific time.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1545397976662790150

If the trend continues and there is GDP shrinkage in the next quarter, then it will basically be in uncharted territory (in both good and bad ways) and know it wasn't a one-off blip due to survey methodology. If it doesn't, then everything will basically be going as expected, but just slower than expected and/or there was a survey sampling issue this month.

quote:

Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again. If, indeed, the price of civilization is repressed sexuality, it was not Sigmund Freud who discovered it. If the consciousness of people is formed by their material circumstances, it was not Marx who discovered it. If the medium is the message, it was not McLuhan who discovered it. They have merely retold ancient stories in a modern style. And these stories will be told anew decades and centuries from now, with, I imagine, less effect. For it would seem that Technopoly does not want these kinds of stories but facts—hard facts, scientific facts.

We might even say that in Technopoly precise knowledge is preferred to truthful knowledge but that in any case Technopoly wishes to solve, once and for all, the dilemma of subjectivity. In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique. They mock statistics and polls and standardized tests and bureaucracies. In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In Technopoly, it is an insult to call someone a “moralizer.” Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Such a program lacks the aura of certain knowledge that only science can provide. It becomes necessary, then, to transform psychology, sociology, and anthropology into “sciences,” in which humanity itself becomes an object, much like plants, planets, or ice cubes.

That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as “discoveries” of scientific enterprise. In this way, social researchers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts. In Technopoly, it is not enough to argue that the segregation of blacks and whites in schools is immoral, and it is useless to offer Black Boy or Invisible Man or The Fire Next Time as proof. The courts must be shown that standardized academic and psychological tests reveal that blacks do less well than whites and feel demeaned when segregation exists. In Technopoly, it is not enough to say it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to read Les Misérables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. You must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are “worth reading”; they are artifacts of our past. But as for “truth,” we must turn to “science.” Which brings me to the crux of what I mean by Scientism, and why it has emerged in Technopoly

Twincityhacker posted:

Increase on WFH tech really doesn't help the bottom of the ladder - you can't really WFH in retail, service, and factory settings.

Incidently, I did move states recently. I moved to a bluer state even! But it still cost about an entire month's wage, and I had a ton of things going for me including not having to pay rent in the new place.

Gripweed posted:

That might be the phase they're in now, but I wouldn't bet money on SCOTUS letting the Pacific Northwest become a little Europe with nationalized industries and robust safety nets. Like abortion, sending abortion back to the states was step one. The actual goal is nation-wide fetal personhood.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Ngl the idea that work from home is becoming the norm any time soon implies to me an entirely sheltered worldview. My job is literally impossible to do from home and I have insurance and decent pay. Are WFHers cool with no doordashers or restaurants or entertainment venues or airports or food production or hospitals or factories or...

The ability for some people to work from home requires multiple people in impossible to WFH jobs for each WFH job by an order of magnitude.

Lib and let die posted:

At the risk of eating a 6er or longer for trodding over the same ground again, I will once again defer to the works of Neil Postman

Heck Yes! Loam! posted:

What point does this make other than 'lol people suck and knowledge isn't real'?