Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement

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Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Japan joins the "everybody but America" global recession club, to the absolute surprise of nobody:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-economy-2023-gdp-893d53deba654c4924e4924f0b321cc5

quote:

according to Cabinet Office data on real GDP released Thursday, .... It contracted 2.9% in July-September. ...the economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.4% in October to December, ...Two straight quarters of contraction are considered an indicator an economy is in a technical recession.

Meanwhile Toyota is happy to produce 80% of the demand for their vehicles, and people will pay 30% over MSRP to dealers for the privilege of driving a halfway decent car

# ? Feb 16, 2024 09:22

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 10:08

Lockback: Sep 3, 2006; All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.

I thought Japan already was in a recession.

# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:06

Dementropy: Aug 23, 2010

The Bad: Not happy news for people in Upstate NY who are finding themselves without jobs.

The Good: Finance CEO facing consequences for their own actions.

https://archive.is/20240215224814/https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2024/02/15/prime-capital-ventures-kris-roglieri.html

https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/albany-lender-center-fraud-probe-files-bankruptcy-18669916.php

https://www.funderintel.com/post/owner-of-prime-capital-ventures-cctg-naclb-and-fupme-in-trouble-with-the-fbi

https://debanked.com/pdfs/lawsuitprimenaclbetal.pdf (The exhibits in this one are... something)

Dementropy fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Feb 16, 2024

# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:41

esquilax: Jan 3, 2003

Lockback posted:

I thought Japan already was in a recession.

They had one, yes. This is second recession.

# ? Feb 16, 2024 15:43

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Hadlock posted:

Japan joins the "everybody but America" global recession club, to the absolute surprise of nobody:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-economy-2023-gdp-893d53deba654c4924e4924f0b321cc5

Meanwhile Toyota is happy to produce 80% of the demand for their vehicles, and people will pay 30% over MSRP to dealers for the privilege of driving a halfway decent car

FWIW you can usually get around that dumb dealer mark up if you're willing to do a little traveling. We got a Toyota at the peak of that bullshit with the local dealerships trying to tack on $10k to the price of a Prius.

The solution was to call around to out of state dealerships and find one that didn't do those markups. They're not super common, but they exist. If you google around a bunch of them have heavy online presences because they actively try to steer that business their way. We got on a wait list and six months later I flew out to do the paperwork and pick up the car.

Flying out and driving back was a pain in the rear end and it's loving moronic that I had to do that, but with how much money we saved I could have flown first class and overnighted in a loving Ritz and still come out significantly on top.

# ? Feb 16, 2024 18:21

Boot and Rally: Apr 21, 2006; 8===D; Nap Ghost

pmchem posted:

thanks for tweet removal.

early reactions largely have the culprit as shelter coming in hotter than expected. that�s known to lag so gotta imagine it should moderate in coming months, but yeeesh, bond and stock markets getting killed today. federal reserve controls the fate of all in 2024.

Folks like Wolfers and Krugman have been talking about shelter coming down, and that shelter lags, thus we should continue to see inflation decreasing, for a while now. If shelter jumps and the market reacts it is because the market is thinking "maybe it won't be moderating in the future". Essentially, the lag works both ways, but for some reason whenever shelter and lagging comes up it is always moderating.

# ? Feb 17, 2024 18:06

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Hadlock posted:

Japan joins the "everybody but America" global recession club, to the absolute surprise of nobody:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-economy-2023-gdp-893d53deba654c4924e4924f0b321cc5

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-likely-recession-bundesbank-says-2024-02-19/

Germany in a recession because.... Checks notes about article...

It says exports are down because everyone else is in a recession already so they're buying less

I wonder what econ intern they interviewed for that nugget of wisdom

# ? Feb 20, 2024 03:43

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

The Times ran an OpEd on part time work that�s very much worth a read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/opinion/part-time-workers-usa.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

NYTs posted:

Back in 2018, with an eye to writing a novel about low-wage work in America, I got a job at a big-box store near the Catskills in New York, where I live. I was on the team that unloaded the truck of new merchandise each day at 4 a.m.

We were supposed to empty the truck in under an hour. Given how little we made � I was paid $12.25 an hour, which I was told was the standard starting pay � I was surprised how much my co-workers cared about making the unload time. They took a kind of bitter pride in their efficiency, and it rubbed off on me. I dreaded making a mistake that would slow us down as we worked together to get 1,500 to 2,500 boxes off the truck and sorted onto pallets each morning. When the last box rolled out of the truck, we would spread out in groups of two or three for the rest of our four-hour shift and shelve the items from the boxes we just unloaded.

Most of my co-workers had been at the store for years, but almost all of them were, like me, part time. This meant that the store had no obligation to give us a stable number of hours or to adhere to a weekly minimum. Some weeks we�d be scheduled for as little as a single four-hour shift; other weeks we�d be asked to do overnights and work as many as 39 hours (never 40, presumably because the company didn�t want to come anywhere close to having to pay overtime).

The unpredictability of the hours made life difficult for my co-workers � as much as if not more than the low pay did. On receiving a paycheck for a good week�s work, when they�d worked 39 hours, should they use the money to pay down debt? Or should they hold on to it in case the following week they were scheduled for only four hours and didn�t have enough for food?

Many of my co-workers didn�t have cars; with such unstable pay, they couldn�t secure auto loans. Nor could they count on holding on to the health insurance that part-time workers could receive if they met a minimum threshold of hours per week. While I was at the store, one co-worker lost his health insurance because he didn�t meet the threshold � but not because the store didn�t have the work. Even as his requests for more hours were denied, the store continued to hire additional part-time and seasonal workers.

Most frustrating of all, my co-workers struggled to supplement their income elsewhere, because the unstable hours made it hard to work a second job. If we wanted more hours, we were advised to increase our availability. Problem is, it�s difficult to work a second job when you�re trying to keep yourself as free as possible for your first job.

No wonder my co-workers cared so much about the unload time: For those 60 minutes, they could set aside such worries and focus on a single goal, one that may have been arbitrary but was largely within our shared control and made life feel, briefly, like a game that was winnable.

Many people choose to work part time for better work-life balance or to attend school or to care for children or other family members. But many don�t. In recent years, part-time work has become the default at many large chain employers, an involuntary status imposed on large numbers of their lowest-level employees. As of December, almost four and a half million American workers reported working part time but said they would prefer full-time jobs.

When I started working at the store, I assumed that the reason part-time work was less desirable than full-time work was that by definition, it meant less money and fewer or no benefits. What I didn�t understand was that part-time work today also has a particular predatory logic, shifting economic risk from employers to employees. And because part-time work has become ubiquitous in certain predominantly low-wage sectors of the economy, many workers are unable to find full-time alternatives. They end up trapped in jobs that don�t pay enough to live on and aren�t predictable enough to plan a life around.

There are several reasons employers have come to prefer part-time workers. For one thing, they�re cheaper: By employing two or more employees to work shorter hours, an employer can avoid paying for the benefits it would owe if it assigned all the hours to a single employee.

But another, newer advantage for employers is flexibility. Technology now enables businesses to track customer flow to the minute and schedule just enough employees to handle the anticipated workload. Because part-time workers aren�t guaranteed a minimum number of hours, employers can cut their hours if they don�t anticipate having enough business to keep them busy. If business picks up unexpectedly, employers have a large reserve of part-time workers desperate for more hours who can be called in on short notice.

Part-time work can also be a means of control. Because employers have total discretion over hours, they can use reduced schedules to punish employees who complain or seem likely to unionize � even though workers can�t legally be fired for union-related activity � while more pliant workers are rewarded with better schedules.

In 2005 a revealing memo written by M. Susan Chambers, then Walmart�s executive vice president for benefits, who was working with the consulting firm McKinsey, was obtained by The New York Times. In it she articulated plans to hire more part-time workers as a way of cutting costs. At the time, only around 20 percent of Walmart�s employees were part time. The following year, The Times reported that Walmart executives had told Wall Street analysts that they had a specific target: to double the company�s share of part-time workers, to 40 percent. Walmart denied that it had set such a goal, but in the years since, it has exceeded that mark.

It�s not just Walmart. Target, TJX Companies, Kohl�s and Starbucks all describe their median employee, based primarily on salary and role, as a part-time worker. Many jobs that were once decent � they didn�t make workers rich, but they were adequate � have quietly morphed into something unsustainable.

One of the most surprising aspects of this movement toward part-time work is how few white-collar people, including economists and policy analysts, have seemed to notice or appreciate it. So entrenched is the assumption that full-time work is on offer for most people who want it that even some Bureau of Labor Statistics data calculate annual earnings in various sectors by taking the hourly wage reported by participating employers and multiplying it by 2,080, the number of hours you�d work if you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. Never mind that in the real world few workers in certain sectors are given the option of working full time.

The problem is that most Walmart employees don�t make $36,400, the annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year, the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 � equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that�s the median; many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl�s employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week. At $15 an hour � the rate Starbucks said it was raising barista pay to in 2022 � 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year, which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

And this is after the post-Covid labor shortage, when pay for low-wage workers rose faster than it did for people in higher income brackets.

The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15 movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that �Walmart�s probably a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a lot of the jobs in higher ed.�

Since my stint at the big-box store, where I ended up working for six months, I�ve come to think that every time we talk about hourly wages without talking about hours, we�re giving employers a pass for the subtler and more insidious way they�re mistreating their employees.

From the perspective of employers, flexible scheduling remains extremely efficient. But that efficiency means reneging on the bargain on which modern capitalism long rested. Since the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act during the New Deal era, employers have had to pay most of their workers for 40 hours of work even when business was slow. That was just the cost of doing business, a risk capitalists bore in exchange for the upside potential of profit. Now, however, employers foist that risk onto their lowest-paid workers: Part-time employees, not shareholders, have to pay the price when sale volumes fluctuate.

To the extent that the shift to part-time work has been noticed by the larger world, it has often undermined rather than increased sympathy for workers. For decades, middle- and upper-class Americans have been encouraged to believe that American workers are hopelessly unskilled or lazy. (Remember when Elon Musk praised Chinese workers and said American workers try to �avoid going to work at all�?) The rise in part-time work seems on its face to support this belief, as white-collar workers, unfamiliar with the realities of the low-wage work environment, assume that workers are part time by choice.

It�s a bit rich. Policies undertaken to increase corporate profits at the expense of workers� well-being are then held up as evidence of the workers� poor character. There is poor character at play here. It�s just not that of workers.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 07:30

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Bar Ran Dun posted:

The Times ran an OpEd on part time work

"One of the most surprising aspects of this movement toward part-time work is how few white-collar people, including economists and policy analysts, have seemed to notice or appreciate it."

I'm not going to deep dive into my decade+ of part time "full time" employment but that statement rings pretty hollow for me. It was always apparent and on slow days a topic of conversation with everyone. Maybe this author had never worked part time before

# ? Feb 20, 2024 08:04

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

Hadlock posted:

Maybe this author had never worked part time before

I think that�s probably the case. But there is a segment of people that never have. There�s a good chunk of folks that go straight high school to college to full time professional employment.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 08:19

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Yeah none of that poo poo was new when I was doing part time bullshit work in the early 00s.

edit: and the 39 hour hard stop the author mentions isn't to avoid OT, it's to avoid benefits.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 16:23

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

I may be misremembering but I'm pretty sure the cutoff for benefits is at 30 or 32 hours, not 39. Although if they're working 39 one week and then 4 the next it may be based on a monthly average

# ? Feb 20, 2024 16:30

Lockback: Sep 3, 2006; All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Yeah none of that poo poo was new when I was doing part time bullshit work in the early 00s.

edit: and the 39 hour hard stop the author mentions isn't to avoid OT, it's to avoid benefits.

Most states benefits kick in earlier, the article mentions that a lot of those part time workers got benefits, but would move on and off depending on how many hours they got. 39 was the ceiling.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 16:42

Leperflesh: May 17, 2007

I worked part-time through college, usually at two different jobs and at one point, three at once. One of them was at UPS on the morning "preload" shift, usually from about 4-8 AM. At that time (mid 1990s) that was considered a premium part-time job, because we were union and our contract guaranteed our health insurance and other benefits even if you only got 20 hours or less in a given week.

Despite that, UPS was aggressively turning full-time jobs into part-time jobs. We had a much lower pay rate, and exactly as the article describes, the flexibility was highly useful to the company because of the ebb and flow of packages through the system and the newly computerized processes that tracked and predicted them. We went on strike in 1997 because the company was refusing to budge on that policy for our new contract as the old one expired, and the major concessions the union forced included reducing to a fixed number, how many part-timers they could have.

It kind of sucked for me and a lot of people like me who wanted that part-time job, because we got a fifty cent payraise in exchange for losing about three weeks of work at $10.50+ an hour and that was it; I was kinda pissed at the time because I was going to school and not seeking a full-time day position at the company. But a lot of other part-timers had been promised that if they worked hard they could eventually transition into a full-time job, and those promises were basically lies if the company was going to just cut driver positions as they retired or quit and turn them into driver's helpers (two people per truck instead of one, run for 4 hours instead of 8, for example).

Anyway point being: manipulating part-time workers was already standard practice across many industries in the 1990s and the only reason UPS was prevented from massively expanding the practice as their predictive technologies improved was a nationwide worker's strike by a fully unionized workforce. And even then, they weren't forced to stop the practice, the best that could be done was to control and restrict it. But also: some people do want part-time work and would really benefit from a job that was always 20 hours each week or whatever, and they should get health care even if they make too much to qualify for government-provided health care.

I'm glad we still get articles like the quoted one because it's absolutely still a problem and a lot of people are unaware of it, or would like everyone else to be unaware of it.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 17:05

PIZZA.BAT: Nov 12, 2016

I was flying out to a customer site back in 2016 and noticed pretty quickly that the lady at the office's front desk would only be there Monday through Thursday. On Friday it would always be this other dude. When I pointed this out along with why it was happening to my coworkers during lunch they all looked at me like I had two heads. It's sad how common it is for white collar workers to be completely blind to this bullshit

# ? Feb 20, 2024 17:32

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Leperflesh posted:

I worked part-time through college, usually at two different jobs and at one point, three at once. One of them was at UPS on the morning "preload" shift, usually from about 4-8 AM. At that time (mid 1990s) that was considered a premium part-time job, because we were union and our contract guaranteed our health insurance and other benefits even if you only got 20 hours or less in a given week.

Despite that, UPS was aggressively turning full-time jobs into part-time jobs. We had a much lower pay rate, and exactly as the article describes, the flexibility was highly useful to the company because of the ebb and flow of packages through the system and the newly computerized processes that tracked and predicted them. We went on strike in 1997 because the company was refusing to budge on that policy for our new contract as the old one expired, and the major concessions the union forced included reducing to a fixed number, how many part-timers they could have.

It kind of sucked for me and a lot of people like me who wanted that part-time job, because we got a fifty cent payraise in exchange for losing about three weeks of work at $10.50+ an hour and that was it; I was kinda pissed at the time because I was going to school and not seeking a full-time day position at the company. But a lot of other part-timers had been promised that if they worked hard they could eventually transition into a full-time job, and those promises were basically lies if the company was going to just cut driver positions as they retired or quit and turn them into driver's helpers (two people per truck instead of one, run for 4 hours instead of 8, for example).

Anyway point being: manipulating part-time workers was already standard practice across many industries in the 1990s and the only reason UPS was prevented from massively expanding the practice as their predictive technologies improved was a nationwide worker's strike by a fully unionized workforce. And even then, they weren't forced to stop the practice, the best that could be done was to control and restrict it. But also: some people do want part-time work and would really benefit from a job that was always 20 hours each week or whatever, and they should get health care even if they make too much to qualify for government-provided health care.

I'm glad we still get articles like the quoted one because it's absolutely still a problem and a lot of people are unaware of it, or would like everyone else to be unaware of it.

For another perspective on UPS, I worked part time there for a period in the early 00s loading and unloading trucks, also as a job that I could do in the evenings when I wasn't taking classes. I was at one of the big hubs and were were the guys who would take the empty trucks and load packages as fast as possible to get them out the door for overnight delivery. 4 hour shifts, usually something like 6-10PM.

There's a lot I could say about that job. It eventually put me in the ER, which is when I quit. And don't even get me started on how they handled the worker's comp claim. But specifically when it comes to being in a union? LOL, hell no. We had one lifer who I think might have been union, or she had some vestigial union duties. Hypothetically she was our safety officer, but that was as toothless a position as could exist (see the above ER trip). There was a LOT firing (and frequently re-hiring shortly after) for basically any and all reasons.

Also one of the managers was running a little package theft ring with the help of some of the other truck loaders and selling both crack and meth to people working there, but that was frankly the least of that place's problems.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 17:59

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

PIZZA.BAT posted:

It's sad how common it is for white collar workers to be completely blind to this bullshit

They often get hit with the salary / professional trap instead, where one is expected to work 70 hours and travel extensively for the role.

A thing that�s changed since the nineties is the algorithmic scheduling, but a couple of big states have outlawed some of the worst of that.

In general the hour cut off for benefits has come down since the ACA to an average of 30 per week for the year. But largely the response has been to just given less hours. Other benefits are at other thresholds and I think they vary by state. There are multiple thresholds they try to avoid.

Logistics and shipping has cultural issues that compound all this. New England sailing norms informed rail management norms informed trucking management norms, informed warehouse / CFS management norms.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 18:45

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

The high school I went to (at the turn of the century :okboomer:

) had an abnormally high college acceptance rate, but everyone worked part time year round in high school, and as close to 40 hours a week as possible on the summer and winter breaks. Most kids also continued to work through college. There were exceptions, one kid was trying for Olympic ice skating and the varsity football team (Texas) etc had 100% of their time already spoken for. Everyone I knew had at least one job, especially the kids going to college, since tuition had started creeping up at the end of the 90s

Although I've seen a couple of graphs, apparently not long after 2000, the share of kids under 18 with part time jobs dropped from like 85% down to about 15%, and I think it's been starting to creep up again

I will echo the 40 hours (or 30?) was largely for benefits cutoff. Anybody who had a baby typically had two x 30 hour a week jobs and generally had priority for reliable scheduling, typically at a small cost to hours (25-28 hrs/week) but their schedule was dead reliable. Always opened MWF, never worked nights or weekends, or whatever

Texas has some weird rule that if you work in the entertainment industry you were exempt from overtime which meant if you worked at a movie theater you could consistently take lazy teenagers' shifts and grind out 50, 80 hours a week. Projectionist jobs were highly coveted as it was nearly a "part time" office job with virtually unlimited hours.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 18:51

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

The way it often works now is that the employees give an availability window and are expected to be available during that period. They might or might not get scheduled. Often an linear algebra algorithm makes the decision. Not available = fired.

There were some fights over how far out they had to tell employees if they had a shift in some states, it was as bad as the shift before for some employers, but I think some rules have gone into effect about it.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 19:29

GhostofJohnMuir: Aug 14, 2014; anime is not good

when i used to work full time in a minimum wage position it was a real pain to only know my schedule a week in advance. i can't imagine not knowing how much i would actually make that pay period

# ? Feb 20, 2024 20:12

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

when i used to work full time in a minimum wage position it was a real pain to only know my schedule a week in advance. i can't imagine not knowing how much i would actually make that pay period

It's fine-ish when you're in your early 20s and it's more a question of if you're going to work or partying tonight. But holy hell it's no way for a functional adult to live.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 20:15

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Yeah not knowing if you're gonna be able to pay rent AND gas this month, or be able to pay down the credit card from last month when you had to pay for gas with a credit card due to not enough hours was fun

Or working a temp job but it's a 4 hour gig on the other side of town, so after taxes and gas you're actually working at a loss, just to make sure you don't piss off the scheduler and hopefully get more 8 hour gigs in the future :allears:

I'm on a number of welding social media things and although the average pay is only slightly above big box retail and involves doing stuff like inhaling zinc fumes from welding galvanized steel, at least they have a regular 40 hr week with nights and weekends off. My life could have been very different if I'd known in suburbia that welding horse trailers 20 minutes outside of town 9-5 x 5 days a week was an option

Apparently the very best guys get scuba certified and then go on to make $software developer money doing underwater oil rig construction and retire comfortably by 45

Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Feb 20, 2024

# ? Feb 20, 2024 20:21

Leperflesh: May 17, 2007

I mentioned that strike? It was 15 days, but that was enough of a hit to my income that I had to drop out of college for a semester. It wasn't that I couldn't afford the semester, it was that I was due to pay for the semester at the same time as the strike was still going and I didn't know how long it would last, and at least part of my tuition was unrefundable, so I was forced to make a poor-person gamble: stay in school and hope the strike ends soon but if it doesn't I could lose my tuition at the same time that I had to find another job or stop paying for food or some poo poo like that: or, drop out and then the strike ends immediately but it's too late to get back into class. I took the latter option.

Having very little money and being dicked around by your employer doesn't just mean you might not be able to make rent this month or you have to cut your food budget; it also forces you into bizarre gambles. What bill should I pay? If I get evicted it was a waste to have paid my past due utility bill, but if I keep my place and the power gets turned off that will suck? The utility bill is way less than the rent, so I can actually pay it right now, and if I get a lot more hours next week I can probably make rent, but if not, I'll be short on the rent by less than the cost of the utility bill and feel very stupid for having paid it and now being loving homeless.

People get totally hosed by a check-advance default interest rate penalty because their employer decided this week it'll just be ten hours and they needed that 20 hour week to pay for last week's advance. I had this one taste of having a rug pulled out from under me and it really changed my view about things, it lasted two weeks but the way I approached budgeting, work, school, and my political views were permanently shifted by a notch or two.

# ? Feb 20, 2024 20:26

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Seems like something the FTC would at least evaluate blocking

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capital-one-discover-35-billion-credit-card-payments-giant/

What are the main players here, visa MasterCard Amex discover? Chase already is a major issuer of credit cards through visa and/or MasterCard

# ? Feb 21, 2024 00:31

Boris Galerkin: Dec 17, 2011; I don't understand why I can't harass people online. Seriously, somebody please explain why I shouldn't be allowed to stalk others on social media!

Discover is pretty great, but their cards are pretty poo poo in comparison to the others.

Capital One is� I dunno, aren�t they known as the subprime of prime lenders?

Chase issues cards on both Visa and MC networks, though I�m not sure of their relevance here. Chase is known for their premium cards.

E: Discover has a card with a doggo on it.

# ? Feb 21, 2024 04:10

Lockback: Sep 3, 2006; All days are nights to see till I see thee; and nights bright days when dreams do show me thee.

On the face it seems like a big deal but I don't know the last time I saw a discover card in person and Capital One is whatever. If they actually use this to bolster Discover to be more of a real competitor this might be a net positive for consumers, or it kinda sucks and then it's pretty neutral.

There may be a side I'm not really thinking of though.

# ? Feb 21, 2024 04:18

Sundae: Dec 1, 2005

CapitalOne is "good enough." My cards are through them (one MC one Visa), but I've had them for over a decade now so no idea what their offerings are like these days. They have an OK points program that is decent for travel purposes and they stay out of my hair + no currency-conversion fees. Good enough for what I need, but I'm not exactly a credit afficiando hunting down the best deals or anything.

# ? Feb 21, 2024 05:20

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Hadlock posted:

I thought this was a pretty impressive statistic

https://archive.is/2024.02.01-17100...ges-2024-01-31/

Seems like a couple of well placed drones by Ukraine could topple the entire russian empire and end the war (unlikely, but maybe)

Now, they're giving year over year numbers, so it's a pretty squishy statistic, but I wasn't expecting 15%+

Russia not just reducing fuel exports, but banning them now

https://archive.is/2024.02.27-083849/https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-bans-gasoline-exports-6-months-march-1-2024-02-27/

Carve outs for Belarus, Kzyrgistan and a handful of other post Soviet states

# ? Feb 27, 2024 23:12

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

kazakhstan is their main catspaw for continuing trade w/ europe so it prolly won't do much

# ? Feb 27, 2024 23:17

Bar Ran Dun: Jan 22, 2006

News is saying grocery prices are starting to drop, being driven by consumers switching to generics:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/25/inflation-vs-deflation-retailers-fear-falling-prices.html

My observation is that a bunch of generics weren�t being stocked everywhere until recently. I�m also seeing that price drop start in the stores I�ve been watching.

Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Feb 28, 2024

# ? Feb 28, 2024 00:38

pmchem: Jan 22, 2010

pmchem posted:

thanks for tweet removal.

early reactions largely have the culprit as shelter coming in hotter than expected. that�s known to lag so gotta imagine it should moderate in coming months, but yeeesh, bond and stock markets getting killed today. federal reserve controls the fate of all in 2024.

following up on this, apparently the january cpi heat (largely due to rent) was a quirk of OER reweighting that only happens in january:

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/notices/2024/rent-oer-information.htm

quote:

Rent and owners� equivalent rent weight information
BLS has received numerous inquiries recently related to the January 2024 Consumer Price Index (CPI) for owners� equivalent rent (OER), which increased 0.6 percent over the month on a seasonally adjusted basis, compared to the over-the-month increase of 0.4 percent for the rent index. The OER index is estimated from the same underlying sample of rental housing units as the rent index. There are several methodological differences between the rent and OER indexes. Additional information on this topic is available in the Measuring Price Change in the CPI: Rent and Rental Equivalence factsheet.

In January 2023, BLS refined the weighting method for OER in the CPI. Unit-level weights for OER are now adjusted to account for structure-type, that is, the proportion of owned homes that are single-family detached compared with non-detached housing units (such as townhouses and condos). See OER Unit Weight Refinement. BLS calculates the detached versus non-detached proportions based on American Community Survey (ACS) data. These data are updated annually effective with the January index. The new method better reflects rental markets across the nation, but it may introduce monthly variability in the unit-level weights. In January 2024, the proportion of OER weighted toward single-family-detached homes increased by approximately 5 percentage points. For details on the new method see the Location, Location, Structure Type: Rent Divergence within Neighborhoods research paper.

bold added by me above

via bloomberg (Levine quoting Boes):

quote:

The US Labor Department�s statistical agency emailed a group of analysts about a key factor behind the jump in January�s consumer price index before trying to take it back, raising questions about the validity of the figures.

A Tuesday email to data �super users,� seen by Bloomberg, suggested a surge in a measure of rental inflation � which had left analysts puzzled � was due to a shift in underlying calculations, rather than just a rise in prices. One recipient said the Bureau of Labor Statistics tried to retract it and told them to disregard its contents. �

good chance feb cpi is more in-line month-over-month (maybe less so YoY)

# ? Mar 2, 2024 20:52

Boot and Rally: Apr 21, 2006; 8===D; Nap Ghost

It depends on how they updated the calculation. Since the updated model is simply the weighting and the underlying data is the same, they could have used the same weighting on December 2023 (as in recalculated, but not published) and January 2024 data. If that is the case then the effect isn't transitory because of mixed models.

# ? Mar 4, 2024 17:45

Baddog: May 12, 2001

"one recipient said the Bureau of Labor Statistics tried to retract it and told them to disregard its contents. …"

This doesn't give me warm and fuzzies!

# ? Mar 4, 2024 18:19

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Does BLS publish the raw data + the excel spreadsheet so you can reproduce their findings, or is this a "it's fine, trust us" type thing? 40 years ago I can understand not distributing the data set, but like, it's got to be a 10mb csv file?

A git diff of the calculation would probably be too much to ask, I guess

# ? Mar 4, 2024 20:30

Boot and Rally: Apr 21, 2006; 8===D; Nap Ghost

I had the same question! It seems odd to not publish something with the actual calculation not just descriptions strewn across a bunch of PDFS. Even just to be sure there isn't Reinhart-Rogoff version 2 in effect.

# ? Mar 4, 2024 20:35

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Tangentially, there's a website called https://isdebianreproducibleyet.com/ which then links to https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.html

Basically Debian is one of the big three Linux distributions. Ubuntu is based off of it. They compile all the base applications in /bin(aries) along with the kernel (core brain if the os) and all the hardware drivers etc (thousands if not tens of thousands of compiled files) it's a huge unsung technological achievement and big chunks of the Internet are dependent on stable Linux distributions like this

Anyways, they compile everything from scratch, along with whatever tweaks might be needed to do Debian things, specifically to run on Debian. If you cryptologically hash all the binaries and files you get a unique identifier. But if you build the same code from the same sources using the same compiler a week later, you'll actually get a different result, because that one program is dependent on version 1.2 and in the interim a library for that version got updated to 1.2.1 and now you can't reproduce the build exactly

TL;DR even if there's like, 10 million rows of data in the BLS model, and 10 separate weighted calculations, that still seems wildly easier to distribute and reproduce inflation numbers than a Linux distro. I dunno I'm not an economist

# ? Mar 4, 2024 20:49

bob dobbs is dead: Oct 8, 2017; I love peeps; Nap Ghost

never assume technical proficiency in any social scientist. no, they don't know version control. no, they don't know ci/cd. they barely know excel

in debian's case, they've been goaded to it by nix and nixos being a thing. economists don't care and don't know

# ? Mar 4, 2024 20:55

hypnophant: Oct 19, 2012

Hadlock posted:

Does BLS publish the raw data + the excel spreadsheet so you can reproduce their findings, or is this a "it's fine, trust us" type thing? 40 years ago I can understand not distributing the data set, but like, it's got to be a 10mb csv file?

A git diff of the calculation would probably be too much to ask, I guess

do you mean the surveys from which the indices are calculated? I don't think those are published anywhere, and it would probably be impractical to do so. The unadjusted indices are available, though. You'll probably also want the explanation of the formulas involved, which also has a discussion of sources of error.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

never assume technical proficiency in any social scientist. no, they don't know version control. no, they don't know ci/cd. they barely know excel

in debian's case, they've been goaded to it by nix and nixos being a thing. economists don't care and don't know

just because economists invented the field of statistics doesn't mean they're all good at it. econometricians ignore most of the issues by making n large

hypnophant fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 4, 2024

# ? Mar 4, 2024 21:05

Magnetic North: Dec 15, 2008; Beware the Forest's Mushrooms

bob dobbs is dead posted:

never assume technical proficiency in any social scientist. no, they don't know version control. no, they don't know ci/cd. they barely know excel

This except software developers. Who the gently caress is expecting that of sociologists?

# ? Mar 4, 2024 21:19

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 10:08

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

hypnophant posted:

The unadjusted indices are available, though. You'll probably also want the explanation of the formulas involved,

Well that's a start

The adjusted values are just those files fed through a different spreadsheet/formula right? Then feed the output of those normalized values into the final set of spreadsheets/formulas. None of this seems any more complex than the analytics pipeline of any other company

Basically what I'd like to do is take the data from 1900-2020, and consistently feed it through a series of data pipelines as they were designed in say 1925, 1950, 1975 etc and see how it looks

We switched from a manufacturing base to services in that time so I'm not sure how useful it is, but it's kind of surprising it's not currently possible

I guess it would take a lot of the mystery out of it though

# ? Mar 4, 2024 21:24

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Economics and current events, no-tweet, no-tiktok: you posted a damn advertisement

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