Willa Rogers posted:

A few years ago I temped at a job with an open-office plan & if the assignment hadn't ended in a month my sanity certainly would have.

I don't understand how employers can think that it's productive to listen to officemates nattering on all day.

webcams for christ posted:

https://twitter.com/financialjuice/status/1635753545184993281

Bar Ran Dun posted:

This is omnipresent. if there are known metric somebody (or everybody!) is going to optimize for the metrics to get an advantage / promotion, thereby distorting what the metrics were trying to on measure.

so I dunno I just go look. I also do this professionally a lot, watch, photograph, and extensively note. serious old school business does this a lot, new “disruptors” not so much.

it’s almost like no one wants to acknowledge that observation both qualitative and quantitative is the first thing to do. instead everybody wants data first and then to back fit a hypothesis to data.

there is also generally a focus educationally on form over substance. it doesn’t matter what the thesis is, grading is determined by its support structurally.

and there is economics it’s all wonderfully structured. built on its clear assumptions with its straight forward correlative relationships expressed in simple lines intersecting. no causative or complex systems thinking. just two lines intersecting.

I mean that’s not useless. but it’s certainly not everything. The complexity and sophistication of a model increases our tendency to accept the model’s conclusions as truth.

I think particularly with Krugman that’s what’s going on. a lot of folks are quick to go to “massaging numbers” as an accusation. that’s unnecessary. somebody like Krugman is doing what they were trained to do and honestly.

dk2m posted:

the way to understand what’s happening right now is not at all what orthodox economics wants to tell you. this is sort of an effort post.

I’m completely simple terms - this is the consequence of Obama and Geithners policy in 2008. when the banks blew up back then, we had a choice - do we as a society protect the creditor or protect the debtor? the answer came clearly down to protecting the creditor - the banks.

the main reason for that is that is because we were in the midst of a revolution - the free trade agreements and de-industrialization policies of Clinton staring with NAFTA and the admittance of China to the WTO in 2001 were turbocharging the equity and bond market.

with labor being squeezed and eventually collapsing by moving overseas, the main enemy of neoliberalism was conquered. unions fell apart and factories shut down, but because of the rise in technology coinciding with dirt cheap foreign labor costs, productivity went through the roof. around the same time, business schools were churning out MBAs that based their framework around finance instead of industrial engineering - older schools like GMI in Flint (now Kettering University) which trained executives to think in terms of industry were giving way to Stanford and Harvard MBAs who prioritized the CFO led model of prioritizing the stockholder.

these coinciding factors led to executives gutting their companies to shutter factories, move them overseas, and largely focus on financial engineering to boost their share price. a characteristic of finance that separates it from a real economy is that financial returns compound while a real economy looks like an S curve - a financial economy simply grows unbounded.

that’s because finance is debt based. banks create debt and make claims on assets. their source comes from thin air - when you apply for a mortgage, they simply push a button and come up with a the money. in theory, they are required to keep a reserve to cover deposits - with deregulation, it has given them less and less to cover on hand, to now virtually guaranteed risk-free government backed bailouts.

i also think it’s important to understand what exactly a bank does. let’s say you deposit some money into one. from a banks balance sheet perspective, your deposit is a liability in an accounting sense. this means that they package the liability, your deposit, into an asset via an exchange on the market.

because a banks primary product is making claims on real assets, they naturally are rent seeking institutions. in order for them to grow and make money, they need 2 things - an ever larger pool of assets to lay claims on and a source of easy credit to lever their claims on to increase their rate of return. the first part is done via privatization - by moving assets from the public domain, such as land or healthcare or education, to the private one, they force the entire population to take on loans, which gives the banks their pool of assets to lay claims on.

the second piece comes from the availability of a Bank themselves to get short term loans. a bank is a special institution under financial capitalism that can enter a repo market with its central bank, the fed. they can collateralize and obtain credit from the central bank and can use that same credit to cover their liabilities (aka deposits) or go into the financial markets and buy stocks, bonds and products.

banks pre 2008 were making extremely risky bets by tapping into the largest debt pool of all - mortgages. because everyone has a mortgage, which pays interest, investment banks began committing outright fraud by packaging garbage loans and making it appear golden and the commercial banks lended loans to anyone with a pulse. this skyrocketed returns across the board as the combination of derivatives and interest bearing loans compounded and grew far beyond the growth of the real economy. in 2008 when it finally collapsed, Obama decided that he would protect the creditors and the only way to do this was to re-inflate the prices of both real estate and the stock market.

this is where the regime of 0 interest rate credit came into play. as money became basically free, banks gave the government all of their toxic bonds and derivatives and in return got free money from the federal reserve to chase returns again. stock buybacks, VC money, institutional housing buybacks, healthcare, insurance, and arbitraging were all turbocharged with QE. this led to an equity and bond market boom as the federal reserve gave the banks enough loans to spread throughout the system to make sure all the distressed houses they had on the balance sheet were not only propped up again, but would eventually far outpace the book value of the homes itself.

as the rally grew, and the economy became more polarized, the creditors and financial class inflated the stock market to obscene levels, but needed more and more assets to lay their credit claims on. this only further impoverished the rest of us, as housing, education and healthcare costs spiraled out of control. rather than see these as the driving costs for what we now call “inflation”, the fed simply doubled down on this regime and left it at near 0 well after the initial recession ended. the small financial class enjoyed unparalleled wealth that had never really been seen before in american history.

what eventually burst this bubble was covid. since we deinsturalized, we faced sudden shortages that caused massive supply/demand imbalances. these causes prices for some goods to spiral, cars for example. in response, the fed dropped another 9 trillion QE regime in which the main intent was to inflate the stock and bond market. this led to the absolutely asinine situation of a soaring stock market amidst collapsing employment.

as covid ended and labor had new gained power to negotiate wages in 2022, the idea of inflation started to really become a mainstream topic in financial news. inflation is really a euphemism for rising wages and employment, but an overall increase of wages would sharply threaten financial returns for all the now CFO led companies and startups. to curb this, the fed decided to raise interest rates.

the problem is that they have flooded the market, since 2008, with low interest rate credit. as companies became flush with cash, especially the tech sector, they parked their money into treasury bonds. most banks barely pay any interest on savings or CDs, something like less than .05%, so wealth individuals and cash plush companies would rather invest in long term t-bonds which were only interrupted after labor suddenly had some negotiation power due to covid.

this whole situation is a consequence of gutting the country of industry and focusing on finance as the primary growth driver. the problem is that now, we have so much credit that has been used to indebt the rest of us, and nearly every bank has underwater bonds as they invested in “safe” treasury bonds, that the system has nowhere to go. the individual actions of banks, such as bailouts, are less of a moral hazard than the overall structure of the economy basically resembling the Soviet Union, but financially rather than via fake production quotas. as the Soviet Union was obsessed with production to to point of it becoming farcical, so we are with finance to the point of it now it being largely fiction as we cannot QE as that would counter act the rate hikes, and we cannot continue the rate hikes as that would collapse more banks. we have to come to the conclusion that banks and creditors ARE the problem, and let them collapse and bring back a goods and consumer spending based economy rather than a fictitious debt based one.

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1635797544591839233?s=20

coelomate posted:

Yeha it’s very bad. This is the biggest financial institution to fail since 2008 and is… wait, is it bigger than Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers were?

It’s really really really bad and it’s extremely not over.

Shageletic posted:

lol i'm seeing this after getting my new CIPP accreditation. Seems like a growing sector of the economy but doesn't seem like there's a lot of people hiring.

Teabag Dome Scandal posted:

Citi?! Is my Costco credit card safe???

Oglethorpe posted:

lol

https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1638977350498160642

webcams for christ posted:

I went to bed shortly after posting a couple haymakers that were light on actual content because, as Hoot suggested a couple pages ago- the thread is often drifting off-topic. but this subject is honestly a great personal interest of mine, and I think I'd benefit a lot from discussing it more often in CSPAM, and there's plenty of lively discussion every time it comes up

I'm going to start working on an Effortpost OP for a new thread, and I'd like to know what would be a good balance between broad enough range to encourage discussion, but unique enough to merit its own thread. off the top of my head I'm thinking about a constellation of these topics:

• the prevalence of obesity across the globe
  
• definitions of obesity
  
• social and economic determinants of health
  
• built environment
  
• physical activity patterns/habits
  
• food quality and availability
  
• agricultural policy
  
• behavior, health beliefs, and eating disorders
  
• anthropology of food
  
• environmental toxicology
  
• genetic risk factors
  
• for-profit weight loss industry
  
• actors who benefit from obesity prevalence
  
• efficacy of weight loss interventions
  
• individual vs collective interventions
  
• tension between body-discrimination/shaming, fat acceptance, and health outcomes
  
• sociology of medicine: public health & social control

too broad? too narrow? catchy title? my first stab would be something like:

C-SPAM > Political Economy of Food, Behavioral Health, and the Obesity Industrial Complex

Rectal Death Adept posted:

Their grocery delivery service has been changing along these lines for years.

When it debuted you could get free 2 hour delivery on orders over $35. It was called "Prime Now" and you could get almost anything from monitors to paper towels to clothes or cleaning supplies. I managed to break a monitor and replace it with a weekly grocery order in less than 90 minutes. Extremely convenient.

Last year they eliminated Prime Now and went to Amazon Fresh which is a more expensive limited selection and mostly grocery based 2 hour delivery that had $5 delivery costs and longer waits.

I just checked and fresh delivery is $10. If you spend $50 it becomes $7. At $100 it becomes $4. Only at $150 does it qualify for free delivery. Also the prices are now worse than grocery stores with zero deals so there is no reason to pay $9.50 for a 12 pack of soda when most stores have them buy 1 get 1 free at that price.

Getting even worse than that is probably a sign of significant issues on Amazon's part after they've already made the service so lovely there isn't incentive to even use it.

Floor is lava posted:

https://openai.com/careers/discord-manager

anyone want to mod a discord for $180,000/y for openai?

Father Wendigo posted:

Time to dump MSFT

https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/1661059041890648090?t=F9YfizohLGGdG4Cnslj3sg&s=19

Pf. Hikikomoriarty posted:

no one can afford a mortgage now anyway

shrike82 posted:

RandomBlue posted:

https://twitter.com/TheeBrianJ/status/1681146400590151680

webcams for christ posted:

https://x.com/helencasey1970/status/1714154865088229664

Woke Mind Virus posted:

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1717935305129676891

Stairmaster posted:

https://twitter.com/numetal_moment/status/1719811918041641161?s=20

https://twitter.com/numetal_moment/status/1719815656164798758?s=20

Xaris posted:

never shop at Safeway, it's really loving bad and insane rip off. like $4.99 for an individual plastic-packaged bell pepper rip off. WF is so much cheaper than Safeway it's not even funny

Xaris posted:

inflation is definitely very bad and feds are blatantly lying, but in this case that's just Safeway being safeway and hoping that the consumer base is premium or very dumb to not pay attention to the exorbitant prices on their goods. you can still get the equivalent 16oz from like target or amazon for <$4

err posted:

what about low 🤣🤣🤣

LuxuryLarva posted:

I looked at the stock market today and now I know what war is good for.

a_gelatinous_cube posted:

A burrito might cost 10 bucks now

skaboomizzy posted:

yeah, WFH fuckin owns, my team lead who lives several states away tells me I need to go into the office one day a week and I'm about ready to tell her "make me do it and see what happens"

gradenko_2000 posted:

huh I genuinely did not know such things existed

gradenko_2000 posted:

I know that youtube ads exist
and I know that there are such things as ads that install itself on your computer if you click through an installer carelessly (and other such similar methods)
I did not know that malware can install itself onto your computer just by sheer dint of viewing an ad through youtube

Xaris posted:

it's a few years old but still relevant: The Imminent Collapse of Digital Advertising

we still haven't seen the downstream effects of ZIRP going away but i think every year inches a little closer to some kind of reckoning to the FREE! ad-driven internet ecosystem

in the mean time, everything will continue to get enshittified.

Paradoxish posted:

The impact of advertising in general is at least somewhat questionable, but internet advertising and "adtech" are really a special case. It's an entire industry obsessed with demographic chasing and targeting with no real awareness that there might be limits to their effectiveness. The real dirty secret isn't that it doesn't work, though, it's that data might not actually be as valuable as companies like Google and Facebook want to believe.

Like, how much does it actually matter that your IP looked at air fryers and baby crap? Literally the entire digital marketing ecosystem is built on the idea that the answer is that that data is almost infinitely valuable, and there's no upper limit on how much data might be genuinely useful. The whole thing comes crashing down if it turns out that maybe there's an upper limit to how much you can actually use that data to sell people crap.

Taima posted:

They're running out the clock on ad blockers so they have an ironclad excuse to move to their real end game which is inserting the ads directly into the videos (imo)

Taima posted:

That’s interesting. I think they’re slowly building a case for using something like that, or at least that’s all I can think of because it feels like the actual endgame, right?

also lol phones are not listening to y’all

Nothus posted:

They're going to have to disable the playback bar while the ad is playing, otherwise it will be real easy to use their "most viewed" histogram to skip the commercials.

Casey Finnigan posted:

i wonder if putting the ads directly into the video stream would open YouTube up to greater legal liability when the ads turn out to be scams or something like that and that's why they haven't done it yet

Kreeblah posted:

Welp, I'm never buying bulk candy at the grocery store again. I got a 16-ounce package of gummy bears (repackaged Albanese 12 flavor bears) and was foolish enough to not think to look at the price. Apparently they were $7.99.

Thanks, Safeway.

anime was right posted:

Shear Modulus posted:

since a recession is defined as when that one think tank says it's a recession it just means that they won't say it is one

Twerk from Home posted:

I'd posit that anyone who can afford to finance a $90k Jeep Grand Wagoneer can afford to fuel it at 16mpg, even if gas hits $8/gallon.

That's only $5000 of gas per 10,000 miles, just nothing compared to what the truck costs. Gas isn't going to anywhere near that anyway, the poor would be ground into paste if it did and gas is under $3 a gallon still around me.

Eric Cantonese posted:

I would totally love a cool muscle car too. I just wonder if I'm going to grow to hate it if I ever am able to afford one.

Aren't Millennials and Gen Z really uninterested in cars and totally happy to get driven everywhere if they can afford it? I think you still need to own a car in order to get anywhere in many parts of the US, but I wonder how much that has affected the future of auto sales.

I suppose there'll always be a market for collector cars, with the hot cars in question changing but the passion still there for people of means.