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Between the articles about the IRA having greater immediate impact than expected, the emission regulation on cars, and this aggressive pursuit of nutritional claims it feels like there is some repositioning to achieve more goals through the executive branch since losing the house. Is this accurate, or is it reporting bias due to a lack of equivalent legislative actions?
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Apr 14, 2023 03:42
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I mean, all of this seems kind of academic/forest-for-the-trees. Even if you think it isn't a big deal in this instance, the overall action is a meaningful step towards tighter regulation on industry and, importantly, includes major players that have been getting away with crap for a while. Sweet-and-low wasn't even confirmed to be one of the targets so far as I can tell, this was just a diversion to explain why all possible "arbitrary" cut-offs allow for some degree of disinfo on packaging - where, again, you could just as easily have a 1g packet of sugar and claim it at 0 calories if your cutoff is 5 calories, and tic-tacs essentially do just that. Obviously these things aren't dietarily important, but would it make more sense and be more honest to advertise as <5 calories instead of 0 if you are just playing silly games with portion size? I think this also sort of hooks into "serving size" anyway, which is another place where people are easily misled. A 20 oz soda being 2.5 servings so they could show the nutrition info for a smaller amount and count on people not multiplying is definitely a scam they pulled for a while, and the fact that they include both partial and complete calorie counts now is definitely the result of an action like this Edit: also, thanks DV for clarifying that this isn't some unique 2023 action but rather a steady effort that just hasn't been noticed as much before. Kind of disappointing in some ways, but also good to know that even if Biden is whatever, at least some of the people he appointed really have been chipping away for a while - I know there have been some aggressive pursuits of antitrust stuff from the start, and wasn't sure if the FDA/EPA had been making similar moves BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 14:28
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InsertPotPun posted:what are they tweeting about? This is just people talking past each other - obviously if you look for #BoycottBrandName you will probably find at least one random result, but that doesn't mean it was, like, a trending tag or an actual controversy that got broadly reported on. I don't consume any news shows, but I still heard about the Bud Light and Target poo poo - I have no clue what this Cottonelle thing is in reference to, but it also seems like it was literally just "an ad with a gay couple somewhere" which isnt exactly spicy in 2023 (or 2019 for that matter) - if someone is going to boycott for that they would have to boycott anyone who has a float at Pride or whatever, it's such a settled issue in comparison to the trans rights fight which is current and pressing and charged on both sides
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Jul 11, 2023 23:16
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I'd add that someone tweeting #BoycottCottonelle may not have even ever bought Cottonelle in the first place - if I say I'm "boycotting" Tyson chicken on Twitter it has no effect on their sales, because as a vegetarian I never bought their products in the first place. That tweet might be from a bot account for all we know - it might be some random Russian dude trying to start poo poo, or it might be Charmin trying to take market share from their competitor (not saying these are the most likely possibilities, just that we don't currently have any facts that would discount these possibilities). It is foolhardy to ascribe a tweet to be a signal of a "right-wing boycott" - it's a monkeys on typewriters thing, if you search for a particular tag you will find it. You can say "PERSON NAME is boycotting Cottonelle", but even that isn't really demonstrated by the tweet since people lie on the internet all the time. If you had a tweet from someone with a substantial number of followers like Tucker Carlson or Dan Bongino (sp?) or whatever then you could say it is a right-wing boycott, as those people are symbolic and their tweets get views and comments, but the article in question is just some bland outrage fishing, it isn't reporting on a "trend", it is the even lazier version of the "Trump voter safari" articles because the author can just search a brand name and post whatever angry tweets they find and hit submit rather than needing to get an actual name or ask people to expand on their opinion Edit: If simply not buying things makes it a boycott, then I'd like to make it known that I am currently boycotting all yacht companies, all cigarette companies, and all car companies. How very moral and significant this boycott is! BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 17:33
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Mellow Seas posted:The “64.8% among non-binary” is hilarious. Giving a figure that must have an MOE approaching 100% to a TENTH OF A PERCENT. Why do pollsters do poo poo like that? Aren’t these people trained statisticians? An engineeeing professor would lose his poo poo on you for something like that. I usually side with Leon over Willa on these sort of nitpicky things but the response that was like "oh, no boycott, huh? Then how do you explain THIS TWEET" (from the peanut gallery, not Leon) was just so weak and aggressive that I felt the need to respond. I don't really think either Leon or Willa are wrong in this case - it's fair to say that there's some minimum level of notability before you can really call something a boycott and reasonable people can disagree about that threshold. I would also say that there's more than one way to fail a boycott, and there's plenty of ways a boycott can fail that would show up in sale numbers - like the continuous boycott of Chick-fil-A that weakens their sales with liberals but strengthens them with conservatives, or a small drop in sales that only lasts a week and isn't sustained. What makes a boycott a failure is that it doesn't harm the company or force them to backtrack on the behavior that instigated the boycott - a one-man boycott goes beyond being a "failure" and into being "nothing at all". Letting people mad on Twitter lay claim to a word as significant as "boycott", stealing the reflected light of the civil rights movement, is ceding ground that doesn't need to be ceded. If there is no evidence of an organized effort by a group of people to coordinate and make specific demands, it's just "sparkling impotence" Edit: to add a little more to the discussion, the reason Cottonelle was the point of contention was because we are trying to analyze "why is the Bud Light boycott sticking and others didn't". We have some sensible theories proposed on the macroecon level for the others (Dodgers don't have an alternative good, boycotting Dicks depends on having a REI or whatever in driving distance), with Cottonelle being the only recent example that is a substitutable/elastic good. Therefore, it matters whether a proper boycott was actually attempted or not, because it is the most 1-to-1 with the Bud Light situation, and would tell us whether this kind of boycott is only possible because of recent changes in the American collective consciousness (i.e. is specifically the result of something that happened between 2019 and now, like Trump losing or changes in media consumption or Twitter being owned by Musk), or if it was always possible for the right wing to successfully boycott a thing and there was just never a critical mass of support for one. If Cottonelle was never pushed by the signalers in right-wing media, then it isn't really a piece of evidence for something having changed recently BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 17:46
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Here's a more detailed article about it. Cottonelle responded and Fox News covered it several days in a row. This article doesn't say anything about how it was covered that the first one didn't - I only see the Twitter posts. If it was covered by Fox for several days, can you maybe link the clips or at least tell us which program the coverage was on or something? Edit: to channel DV a bit, the sources we are looking at aren't exactly solid reporting. They both are nearly identical, the added length is mostly just putting sentences around the quotes instead of just embedding tweets. It kind of feels like one might have literally been posted in response to the other. They don't even have any quotes from "social media experts" or "gay rights advocates" or anything that would require even a modicum of effort to verify, and there are 0 real names in the body of the article, so we have no evidence that any real people said these things. If the NYT was to write an equivalent article, they would contact the tweeters and get their real names and ask for more info about why they care, and then interview gay consumers to see if they were more likely to buy the brand as a result, and then get something from a nonprofit about the behavior and how it matches or defies societal trends. Basically, it feels ridiculous that someone would use social media posts as the entirety of the content of an article with no other sourcing. It isn't meaningfully better than copy-pasting comments from a local Facebook group and claiming that it represents some larger trend. Like, just to be totally clear here, the two tweets embedded in the first link have 28 and 7 likes and no retweets, and the screenshot of the third one (which is in both articles but isn't loading right in the first one) has 5 likes and 2 retweets at the time the article went up. At that point, you are literally doing more to signal boost and support a boycott by posting the article than any of the people you are quoting in it. It may as well be a Cottonelle ad, since it is basically daring the LGBTQ community to "fight back" against these random nobodies BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 18:02
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Mellow Seas posted:The boycott discussion in general is good but do we have to keep talking about this Cottonelle thing? Because at this point I feel like the argument is more “how much of a Liar is Leon” than “was Cottonelle boycotted.” Leon replied to the replies to reiterate his point that he still thinks Cottonelle is a pertinent example to counter the argument "Bud Light is easy to boycott because the alternative is 1 foot away on the shelf", so it's still a live point in the overall discussion of "why is Bud Light different". If he wants to drop it he can, but he didn't, so it feels a bit silly for you to be defending his honor when he can do it himself. If he now agrees that the amount of media coverage and figurehead support was substantially different, then we can look for other relatively recent examples from the big list that Willa posted or any other product-rather-than-business that people happen to recall to determine if we think the explanation is sufficient or if there might be other trends to analyze here Edit: InsertPotPun posted:so it was less "i don't see anything about a boycott" and more "i don't see anything about an organized boycott lead by a sufficiently influential person or entity" This is more what my reply was to in the first place - of course we mean an "organized boycott", that's a redundant phrase. Here is the M-W definition of boycott: "to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (a person, a store, an organization, etc.) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions" If you don't coordinate it, and you aren't expressing your disapproval or demands as a group, then it isn't a boycott. If the tag actually trended it would be a boycott, because people who use the tag would have seen the first person use it and therefore are acting unitarily. In response to the bit above about the stages of a boycott, the Hogwarts Legacy one is kind of tricky, because there's no before-and-after numbers. It's a single item, no subscription or anything, and people knew to be mad before it officially released so there isn't some point on the sales line where you can point to as "boycott starts here". It's totally possible that the game missed out on many thousands of potential sales, but the results would be invisible. It's really hard to get good data on these sorts of things, so the Bud Light bit is interesting - especially because they managed to piss off both left and right. It seems possible that the secondary backlash was more impactful than the primary backlash tbh - if any significant amount of queer-inclusive bars dropped them in response to the walk back, that would have a much bigger impact on numbers than grocery store sales to randos. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 18:22
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celadon posted:The consumption of alcohol is generally considered more of a social event than the consumption of toilet paper. I don't necessarily disagree with that, but it doesn't falsify the initial point about Bud Light being easily substituted but rather bolsters it. The fact that you can decide in the moment to buy a competitor is the whole point people are trying to make - it's a lot easier than some other things. For that matter, I'd argue that another difference is how often you are buying the product. I can't speak for everyone, but it isn't like I'm going through a whole 12-pack of toilet paper in a week, maybe not even in a month. If the discussion of the ad only lasted for like 3 days, only 1/5th or 1/10th of people who normally would buy Cottonelle would even have an opportunity to change their behavior based on what they heard that day - you'd have to keep it in mind until the next time you actually bought toilet paper. In contrast, the amount of beer that people consume is definitely variable, and there's probably some sort of "80% consumed by 20% of customers" dynamic. The most frequent drinkers get some literally every day, and most anyone who matters will at least drink once or twice a week (sports game nights or weekends). I think that might be more important for the sake of a boycott than anything to do with direct "peer pressure"
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Jul 12, 2023 18:50
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zoux posted:While it's bad for the brand of beer that is Bud Light, how much does AB InBev care? Their stock price has been pretty steady and probably a lot of Bud Light boycotters switched to another InBev product without realizing it. I think we probably collectively care less about what the corporation thinks than we do what society at large thinks. The biggest reason this boycott matters is because it directly contributes to the dehumanization of trans people in the US, not because InBev might lose money. The concern is that it might embolden the same people to take similar actions again and cause a chilling effect on trans acceptance in branding and the public square and make coming out as trans more difficult as a result. Because of that, it is important for us to assess if this is a new tactic that is likely to be reproduced or if it was a fluke or confluence of circumstances with limited reproducibility. In the immediate term, it seemed like it did impact some stores in that they reduced or removed pride displays, and specifically, as noted, they are trying to make the wave extend to Target and Chick-fil-A (?). We want to determine if these boycotts will take off, because we want to know if Joe Rogan or whoever can actually mobilize people against ANY brand that supports trans rights in a visible way, or only against a narrow band (i.e. consumer goods, or specifically food and drink, or specifically items that are disproportionately popular with people in his fan base compared to the general population) It definitely seems like they are going to keep trying it, so it is important for us to know how successful it might be and consider what steps or strategies might mitigate it (obviously the Bud Light strategy of walking it back but only halfway is very ineffective) as it contributes to the perception of trans rights as toxic, so even if we don't care about boosting capitalism we need to think about what we can do to pressure orgs not to cave, even if that means threatening an LBGTQ strike instead of trying to purchase poo poo-rear end beer
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Jul 12, 2023 20:13
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RealityWarCriminal posted:I think it's silly to presume any group owes their vote. It was silly when Biden said it and he got roasted for it. Since then we've learned nothing. I don't think interpreting it as being "owed a vote" makes sense, people can certainly choose not to vote and many people did. I think it makes perfect sense to say "if you are trans, Biden might be losing to 'didn't vote', but Trump or DeSantis are such a distant 3rd and 4th that you need a magnifying glass to see them on the graph". You can make the case for flip votes vs base turnout as the more important factor, but there is no universe where trans people are a substantial portion of flippable votes to Trump, just cases where you can depress their turnout
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Jul 13, 2023 18:44
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I watched a recent Black Mirror episode the other day where the premise was a streaming company AI-generating a TV show based on a random person's life and that person getting none of the revenue - something tells me the writers and actors were intimately familiar with the experience
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Jul 13, 2023 20:33
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Do you mean supporting actors? Extras are already not eligible for residuals and get paid a flat rate. The point is that the suggestion was made that they could give an extra one day of pay and then use them in every future film by feeding an AI version into crowd shots Edit: the Black Mirror episode was both - as you may recall, a central issue was that Selma Hayek was paid a single flat amount for use of her likeness, which they then abused to have her play a version of the central character - in other words, the message of the parable is that streaming services are abusive from the bottom up, to both consumers and actors, and that data harvesting and AI scripting were both hosed up parts of the capitalist machine that makes us hate ourselves and consume more BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jul 13, 2023 |
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Jul 13, 2023 20:38
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The difference is also the size of the gap and relative positions. In fairness, I don't think Willa is wrong on Desantis's odds of winning the nom - even using the most optimistic meaning of the poll numbers ("this is what the candidates would receive if the election was held today"), the 99% confidence interval for either of those is Biden and Trump respectively. The odds for either Kennedy or DeSantis have more to do with actuarial tables for Biden and Trump than whatever the current polling says, if we are being honest
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Jul 13, 2023 20:47
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Killer robot posted:The big difference is that if Trump dropped dead tomorrow Desantis would be a serious contender, and if Biden dropped dead tomorrow RFK Jr's chances for the Democratic nomination would not increase substantially. Both sides have people who find it convenient/interesting to pretend there is a serious race going on even though they know there isn't, but I think everyone knows that distinction between the two except perhaps RFK Jr. I don't know that I'd put DeSantis down as "a serious contender" even if Trump dropped dead. I'd put the conditional probability at like 5-10%, peaking this early in the primary season isn't great for the clown car style and his strategy is Godawful from what reporting we've seen - he is deliberately not setting up to win anything before super-Tuesday. He's really dumb and has bad political instincts, is what I'm saying, he wouldn't hack it as a national politician
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Jul 13, 2023 21:14
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the_steve posted:There's no need for panic. I don't necessarily disagree that the other Republican candidates would be around as bad as Trump, I just think that it still would be catastrophic even if it was "just" DeSantis. Not only would he push to gently caress over the LGBTQ+ community even more than they already have been by the Supreme Court, he would be on a crusade against "woke" companies and absolutely gut all of the agencies all over again - having only 4 years for the administrative state to recover is really bad, especially as we are getting to the point where climate change has cascading effects. DeSantis is every bit as venal and petty as Trump, but he also has motivation beyond personal enrichment, which makes him more likely to chase down goals that Trump didn't have the follow-through to pursue. All of that said, the House and Senate are more important for a bunch of things, so whether it is Trump or DeSantis the real thing we are worried about is an R trifecta
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Jul 14, 2023 01:40
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I know it's too late, but I'm sad the thread title didn't lean into his name. "GOP finds Johnson after 3-week search" has some potential, maybe workshop it a bit and send it to one of the tabloids that does funny headlines
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Oct 26, 2023 14:32
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I feel like there's a big "chicken-or-egg" issue in the way people talk about voting where people say things like "X candidate hasn't earned my vote". Voting is not like purchasing a service, where you can just save up your money and choose to spend it later - your vote goes from being worth 1 to worth 0 when you fail to cast it. If you haven't voted for 10 years your opinion becomes valueless to politicians, because you are not a "likely voter", they don't include you in their analysis of what gets them to 51%, and you have set your money on fire for no return. It's even one step more out there when people say it about an entire party. Casting your vote for a Democrat or registering as a Democrat to vote in the primary is not like signing a contract for a phone plan, you aren't signing on to the entire agenda and committing yourself to their policies. It's more like paying union dues so you can make decisions about what contract you all will collectively sign - that's basically how primaries are supposed to work. Yeah, it really sucks when the union agrees to a contract that doesn't include parental leave or enough sick days or wage increases tied to inflation. However, quitting the union isn't going to give you any more control over your working conditions - it just makes you fragmented and powerless. You will never improve the union from outside of the union, so when you say the union doesn't represent you - no poo poo! It's not even that voting is some kind of moral imperative or whatever, but withholding your vote just makes politicians ignore you since no one can tell on a statistical level if you are principled, unmotivated, uninformed, or lazy. If you want the data nerds to treat you as a voting bloc, you need to vote constantly so they have enough data points to track you, and then you might be able to rise to the level of importance of the New York Yeshiva or African-American South Carolina voter. Being a bloc that is identifiable and RELIABLE is really important if you want politicians to say things and make policies that appeal to you, because they need to know that if they say "universal health care" you will DEFINITELY vote, and in enough numbers to negate the people who have staked out the opposite position. If, instead, your vote is contingent on 3 or 4 different issues at the same time, the politicians will weight you at 1/3 or 1/4 the weight of the people with straightforward conditions, because they have to piss off 3x or 4x the number of people to get you to show up. If your conditions have never been met, then they won't even try, because they have no data to tell them what to do. Edit: Obviously we all prefer politicians that believe in our causes because they came to that decision on their own for reasons intrinsic to them, but even the best politicians probably don't feel strongly about every issue, and they are going to try to maximize votes/match their constituency on anything they don't feel strongly about. Additionally, since there are only a handful of candidates out of a potentially huge pool of eligible people, people are going to make decisions about entering and staying in races based on whether they think they have a shot - there's a lot more than just voting that goes into that, but having a plausible path to victory is a big part of that, and when a bloc has anemic turnout on a consistent basis that path narrows On a semi-related note, someone on a previous page was pointing out that AIPAC didn't donate that much in a recent cycle - that's a total red herring. The power of AIPAC and any similar org isn't the money THEY donate, it's the money they DIRECT through their signaling. I have no idea who the specific power players are in that regard, but there is no way in hell that pissing off AIPAC wouldn't lead to knock-on effects from individual donors and PACs ditching the same people - Emily's List is another well-known org in a similar vein, and they donated around $5m in total for 2022. The block is more than just the org that you most strongly associated with it BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 03:37
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I was kind of hoping that the voting derail would be over by now, but for what little it matters I think all the "blood on your hands" kind of stuff is pretty tedious in either direction. It's "we live in a society" or "no ethical consumption under capitalism". If people want to just not vote then fine - don't post about literally doing nothing at us and just don't vote. There isn't anything added to the conversation by making it about you not voting because of <<topic>>, if you want to talk about <<topic>> just do it. That applies whether we are talking about Israel or not getting your pandemic check, or whatever the topics in between those two were.
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Oct 31, 2023 03:34
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volts5000 posted:Maybe I'm missing something here, but does impotent, hollow, meaningless harumph-ing make any difference in the grand scheme of things if the immediate outcome is the same? Politicians have power other than passing bills. I think it's pretty reasonable, in particular, to note that city and state officials ONLY affect international issues in ways other than passing bills - having a politician make a speech at your march is a really good way to get media focused on you, and if you want people to send money to the Red Crescent then having a politician signal boost or contact their donor network will make it a lot easier to hit targets. I don't really think that would undo the harm that Trump would have done by just cutting all foreign aid from the budget, but it's not nothing
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Oct 31, 2023 22:56
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Let's be clear here, there are many more extreme positions than what Biden has decided - he could declare war against the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis of evil and deploy US troops, or cut off aid like what was threatened immediately after Oct 7 by the EU. He's definitely got a trash-tier opinion, but on a scale of -10 to 10 where -10 is in the tank for Hamas and 10 is in the tank for Bibi, Biden seems to be at probably a 5 or 6. The average person is probably at -2 or -3 right now and the average SA poster is probably -6 or -7. It feels more extreme because basically no countries are past Biden on policy this time around because it is so cut-and-dry that everyone went from sympathizing with Israel on October 7th to denouncing them in just a couple days except for sticky Joe Biden who has taken weeks to move down one notch.
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Nov 1, 2023 01:20
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:2023: The year that Super Gonorrhea became a real thing. Is there any analysis of how common the resistant strains are? Obviously this is bad news but the way the article is framed kind of feels like a combo of marketing for the company making the new drug and capitalizing on reader interest in infectious disease that could be a MAJOR CRISIS in the wake of COVID. Adaptations that block mechanisms of action for antibiotics aren't likely to be favored in a vacuum - there were thousands of years for bacteria to find the most efficient processes before antibiotics and only like 100 years since then, so it's not necessarily a given that this mutation will beat wild type unless there's some indication of it actually competing rather than a handful of isolated cases
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Nov 3, 2023 16:45
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On the topic of China I think there is good reason for the US to be wary of getting too close - the EU spent a bunch of years entwining themselves into Russia's economy and now has lost a bunch of that investment and has to deal with restructuring because of the political need to sanction them. Similarly, free trade/globalism/international supply chains took a major hit from COVID, and the US made moves to relocate battery production to the US because it is considered strategically important to maintain control over that capacity in the same way that microchips have been strategically important. The US made similar moves with oil supply starting around 2005 to reduce economic vulnerability to instability in the Middle East. You also have to consider the fact that China has long refused to be a market for some US exports like Facebook and Google due to the Great Firewall, so in some ways it is just tit-for-tat when the US makes a big show about TikTok as a national security concern - China knows the score, if they play protectionist it shouldn't be a big surprise when they get iced out in return. The place where this intersects with military concern is the moves China is making in Africa and the Pacific. On the face of it, they have been keeping these moves framed as trade, but the US is keenly aware of how trade can be used to achieve military objectives just by virtue of using similar tactics in Central and South America and the various islands that are part of the US's colonial history. I think it is pretty easy to see how Belt and Road could translate to the same sort of client relationship that, for example, Argentina has with their debt holders, and it's definitely bad that areas impoverished by colonialism now have to take out loans rather than having their extracted wealth repatriated. This has already played out, and it's not going to be a surprise when 10 or 20 years from now China takes possession of the capacity that got built with their capital when missed payments accumulate and use that as leverage to do neo-colonialism. It would be much preferable for the colonists to acknowledge their wrongdoing and take appropriate actions to make reparations so this exploitive situation would never seem appealing to the recipients in the first place, but failing that it's clear why it's geopolitically unappealing to let China take a turn extracting value. The posturing about control of the Pacific will probably not result in any military action unless China inexplicably decides it wants to achieve those same ends with violence, but I don't think it is that surprising that the US is framing economic opposition as simultaneously military opposition, because if China is completely stymied from achieving their ends with economics then military means might well become appealing to them (and the US and Europe are the same, this isn't an orientalist take).
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Nov 11, 2023 21:54
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Fister Roboto posted:Also can't say I'm a big fan of Biden trying to flank Republicans from the right on who can worship ARE TROOPS the most. It's for Veterans Day, I doubt this will be a running theme
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Nov 12, 2023 16:25
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mobby_6kl posted:There's a coherent endgame for Ukraine - russia is defeated and expelled from occupied territory and things go back to normal. The only problem is that nobody (other than Ukraine obviously) is actually committed to makign that happen. Yeah, I think it's really important to distinguish between a war of defense and regime change. I'm sure there's someone out there that would claim that the current Ukrainian government isn't "legit", but it's a huge stretch compared to, say, any given US action in South America to prop up or depose someone. The reason there was never any hope of making progress in Afghanistan is because there isn't popular interest or institutional inertia to keep a government working without training wheels, and associating that project with American imperialism just pushes back the date to that popular support ever forming. Based on my limited understanding, it doesn't really even seem like Afghanistan's borders make any particular sense - the people living there would probably have a better time if regions split into their own countries, and even then the whole idea of "national government" seems kind of arbitrary to impose on people that don't necessarily have a shared national identity or all that much desire for one. The fact that so many different empires have tried and failed to impose one on them seems like a strong signal that everyone should just quit doing that and let the people living there make decisions about their own governance, even if that means doing so without some overarching national government for the UN or treaty signing or whatever. In contrast, Ukraine would have a functioning national government if Russia, the US, and the EU all got out and took their weapons with them - they had one before, the current one is probably still reasonably representative of the people, and it seems like enough people vote and/or are invested in a national project to defend it from internal or external foes
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Nov 24, 2023 21:46
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Misunderstood posted:
I think any time you appeal to "macro 101" you are doing a huge disservice. Models that are taught in 101 classes are, across all subjects, overgeneralized and frequently wrong. If someone tells you how a system works and your counterpoint is "but that violates a principle from a 100-level class", they are going to tell you to finish your degree before you bother trying to comment on specific cases. In this instance, let's counter macro with macro. Your argument is that government spending will cause inflation because it contributes to overall demand which, all else equal, increases the price of goods. That's true in the immediate term in a vacuum. However, if the government spending leads to an increase in production by, say, creating new factories for cars and batteries, then over a slightly longer period the same policy might increase supply to an equal or greater degree than demand. Another important point here is that when we are talking about inflation, domestic supply and demand of goods is not the only factor. We also care about exchange rates, and the balance of imports and exports. Notably, the policies applied by the legislation aren't strictly spending-related. The requirements for the rebates require domestic production of certain parts, creating a sort of back-door tariff. This creates a bunch of additional complexity, as in this case we are still buying imports (the machinery for the battery factories) but we also are cutting OFF imports for a different category (the batteries themselves). This leads to a bunch of different arrows in opposite directions - macro 101 is not going to tell you what the net effect is. It's fine to cite experts that say inflation was caused, but you should ACTUALLY cite them here, not just appeal to authority. Here's an article about how inflation rate has been higher in Europe than in the US: https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/europe-faces-dirtier-inflation-fight-than-us-2023-09-06/ Notice how the woes they cite include weak exports and low GDP growth, both things that the policies in question would be expected to affect. In a lot of ways, I think looking at comparative inflation across different economies is much more valuable in determining whether a policy caused inflation than any amount of theory would be, and while you can point to other factors (European reliance on Russian oil), they still typically are going to be somewhat the result of policy (US investment in domestic production of oil)
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Nov 25, 2023 18:53
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Perhaps biased by living in one of the scary stans currently but like, you do realise Afghanistan with its modern borders wasn't invented by the west right? It was founded with nearly the same borders 200 years ago (literally 200 years ago, 1823, we don't gotta estimate)by Dost Muhammad Khan several decades before having to fight the first of many british invasions it defeated. It is not a fake country and afghans tend to like being afghan, not fond of splitting into regions some guy half a world away thinks they should be in. Let me clarify - I'm not saying Afghanistan as a country or region should cease to exist or be split up on maps, I'm saying Afghanistan as a nation-state doesn't necessarily make sense. Even in 1823, nation-states were not how people thought of countries and governance - your borders were determined by conquest and treaty first and foremost, not by people accepting governance. The unity is the result of force or implied force, not consent of the governed. Obviously this is just as true of the European countries of that period with their overseas colonies and political marriages, or China in many historical periods, or the territories of Genghis Khan. Those are borders as envisioned by a ruler from the top down. If we think about the North American continent pre-Europeans, most of the people there would not consider themselves to be part of a nation-state, nor would a medieval peasant or the populace of a colonized nation. The entire concept of geographic borders of government corresponding to a given cultural identity is a modern concept that generally seems to have done more harm than good, IMO. It's easy to see how this plays out in places like Russia, China, and the US - strong national governments make choices that, typically, a majority of people don't benefit from, and the supposedly shared national identity is a tool to homogenize or disempower any smaller identity groups. I don't think this is a good thing - we deal with it in US politics because we have to work from the point we are at, but virtually everyone here probably agrees that the electoral college sucks, our constitution is broken in some pretty significant ways, and there are really stark divisions that make a single "American" identity a harmful fiction. What I'm saying is that rather than imposing this structure on every other group of people we make contact with, it should be perfectly acceptable to let groups make their own choices about who and how they associate. Rather than establishing a single national government and then using that to decide regional and local governments, it would really make a lot more sense to let groups of people decide their own governance model and then voluntarily enter into whatever higher structures they choose - if they choose to. Given that the Middle East and Central Asia have a fair number of nomadic people, the establishment of rigid borders at all is already a majorly harmful imposition that exists to simplify things for national taxation and global relations rather than for the benefit of the people it contains. Edit: I think the modern history of the Kurds is the thing that always comes to my mind when I think about the borders in the Middle East. They constantly face genocide and oppression because violent regimes want to impose national identities that don't leave room for them. The same thing happens in Tibet and Xinjiang. At some point, we need to acknowledge that this concept of nation-states is reinforcing this kind of cultural oppression and change course BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Nov 26, 2023 |
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Nov 26, 2023 16:22
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The way that people keep talking about the issue honestly makes it feel like what is really happening is that people working full time on salary for didn't ask for raises and the people working for an hourly rate found other jobs or went back to school or whatever. If you got a 1% raise you weren't working hourly. A pretty large portion of the economy is made up of people who work part-time and/or hourly and when a bunch of people left the workforce because of age/COVID/caretaker responsibilities ALL of those people got a huge bump. Now we get a bunch of thinkpieces that say "what's so bad about the economy, and the answer is that a lot of people are fine, maybe even technically better off because they paid down loans a bit during the pandemic, but either A. They have lower real wages or B. They are spending a higher proportion on food even if they are spending less across all categories accounting for inflation. The biggest trick is that people have been paying basically the same for gas for like 15 years and they will never internalize that as a savings because for most of that period inflation was like 1%
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Nov 29, 2023 23:54
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Agents are GO! posted:
drat must be nice to afford living in a featureless cream-colored void. On the consumer confidence indicators - that actually brings up a possible alternative explanation. What if the "bad economy" that voters are referring to is the GLOBAL economy, or at least the USD-denominated economy? It is one factor that is different between the US and other countries to a meaningful degree, and a fair number of people actually do interact with economies of other countries in their daily life - you have families of immigrants sending money home and people working at US-based companies with international employees for starters. Obviously the US isn't the only place with immigrants or international coworkers, but I do wonder if there is some potential value in examining data breakdowns by more demographic factors like that, which can be harder to track Edit: the political polarization thing may also matter a bit, but it isn't new even according to your own chart - there's just a persistent 25% of naysayers or yeasayers or whatever that effectively restrict the possible range out outcomes for polling to 15-85% and that's baked in. The world economy DID experience a significant disruption that still hasn't been remediated and it makes some sense to me that it would be the case that perceptions of "recovery" might lag more for the world's reserve currency. That chart is also weird AF though, I guess we are looking at "real GDP relative to index date" or something and "the poll response we have had when previously at that ratio to the index"? BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Dec 2, 2023 |
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Dec 2, 2023 16:06
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:That may be the case for the world in general, but it's clear from the wild swings that the polarization in the U.S. is having an excessive impact on polling results. I suspect that the cause of that is the right-wing propaganda machine which has made it normal to reject facts which don't fit with preferred political beliefs (and the mirrored response on the left is a reaction). Literally the quoted chart showed that Democrats went way up and way down in directly the opposite manner of Republicans at the elections of Trump and Biden, and this is only showing party-identified responses. Additionally, the gap in perceived/actual economic conditions is only since 2021 while the polarization predates that, it isn't sufficient as an explanatory variable unless you can show that 2021 specifically is some kind of turning point in terms of the number of people who identify as Republicans or something. The partisan bias in both sides evens out, that's what I mean by naysayers and yeasayers - it isn't the same people with the cynical/Pollyanna attitudes at every point in time, it's the boosters and haters for the current political leader regardless of party
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Dec 2, 2023 17:33
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I don't understand why people are stumbling on the difference between caffeine per serving and caffeine per volume. Something like 5-hour energy will bill itself as having "as much caffeine as a cup of coffee". If Panera was saying their lemonade drink had "as much caffeine as a cup of coffee", a consumer will rightly assume that means in total. If what ACTUALLY happens is "as much caffeine as coffee, by unit volume", that's a totally different claim. If you buy a 1 oz bottle of 5-hour energy and it contains 16 mg of caffeine then it doesn't have "as much caffeine as a cup of coffee" either. Further, it does not stand to reason that, because you can sell monster energy in a can at 7/11 it is totally chill to have it in the fountain dispenser. It definitely doesn't follow that you can call it "lemonade" instead of "energy drink" or whatever. This isnt because of morality or whatever, but because words mean things, and when people get "lemonade with caffeine" they think it's Brisk or Arnold Palmer levels of caffeine, (1-3 mg/oz) not a caffeine pill dissolved in lemon juice
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Dec 6, 2023 00:02
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Misunderstood posted:For the record, a 30 oz cup of Coke has about 100 mg of caffeine. Starbucks serves all kinds of glorified milkshakes that go past 300 at that size. This "charged lemonade" is not an absurd outlier beverage - it is the kind of thing that people who have high caffeine dependency and availability like to have available. Right, so in the first case you can see how it would be surprising if an item advertised as "juice with a kick" is nearly 4x as caffeinated as the "unhealthy" alternative that you might be trying to avoid by getting something with fruit in it. In the second case, you aren't the one filling your cup - sure you might be a nutter and order something with a triple espresso shot, but no one can say you didn't know what you were getting. The intersection of these two things is where it gets especially dicey - not only is it much more caffeinated than the items it is displayed with, it also is eligible for whatever this Big Gulp refill program is - imagine if Starbucks let you get a free refill on your triple espresso mochaccino or whatever. I understand that caffeine is very integrated in society, and everyone is used to being able to get coffee or soda wherever they want, but given just how much caffeine you are getting in one cup and how much it deviates from consumer expectations (again, more like Brisk or Arnold Palmer than Monster or Rockstar), you don't have to be an ambulance chaser to see how this could be dangerous for customers. This kind of feels like the "I can't believe they sued McDonalds just because some idiot burned themselves on coffee", where people assume the product in question comports with their common-sense expectation and then you explain that, actually, the coffee was like 205 degrees, so hot it caused severe burns when it was spilled. This drink isn't Mountain Dew, don't assume it is Mountain Dew just because that feels like what would be reasonable Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think it's necessarily verboten even to have an energy drink dispenser in your store if you so choose - I don't think it would be a GOOD idea for a variety of reasons, but if it was clearly labeled as the energy drink dispenser and what it dispensed was standard products like Monster, Rockstar, or equivalent generics AND the caffeine content was labeled on it, then sure. Similarly, you can totally have a communal coffee pot that anyone can pour from, because 'everyone knows' that coffee has a lot of caffeine. The problem is, we know how people drink fountain drinks, we know because people get up in arms when you try to restrict them for health reasons, and we know that if you give someone bigger cup options they will take them (especially if the price/oz is better). What's especially egregious is that the drink has more caffeine than is allowed in soda ("cola-type beverages" to be specific). That number is 71 mg/12 oz (I didn't know the exact number until I Googled), which is roughly 6 mg/oz. This drink has MORE THAN DOUBLE that number Just to be clear, it is also more caffeinated than Monster, NOS, or Rockstar on a per-oz basis. It is WAY more caffeinated than any reasonable person would expect from something calling itself lemonade because it is much closer to an energy drink Here's their online order page - note that you can get it in a half-gallon jug for the office or whatever too. "naturally-flavored, plant-based. Contains caffeine." The label is just the fruit flavors in their usual friendly font, why would anyone assume it has more caffeine than Monster? BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Dec 6, 2023 |
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Dec 6, 2023 15:15
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:FRED says the median explicitly has gone up since 2019. That's not inflation adjusted, though fair enough that bar ran dun said they got "hit by inflation" implying a loss of real wages rather than net neutral. Practically speaking, by my eyeballing I think the number linked basically amounts to a 0% change in real wages though assuming 4.7% and 8.0% (the average YoY inflation according to the fed). Technically I think it's a small loss, as I got 40549 when multiplying the 2020 number by the rates for 2021 and 2022 while the reported median is 40480, but I don't know what month I'm comparing to and I'm not going to take the time to use a real methodology. You are definitely wrong if you measure from 2019 though, as the averaged YoY for 2020 is 1.2 and the median went down from 2019 to 2020, so including that span makes BRD right and you wrong on the main point of contention (is the median earner better off than before) so far as I can tell.
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Dec 7, 2023 18:05
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I had a somewhat horrifying thought that makes perfect goddamn sense: the reason this is happening could easily be because people paid down a huge amount of debt during the pandemic. This isn't an authoritative source, but I think it should at least be true in terms of directions and magnitude: the average American now has $8,000 less (non-mortgage) debt than they did in 2019: https://www.google.com/amp/s/money.com/average-american-personal-debt-amount/%3famp=true I did some kicking around government sources and it seems likely this might be bourne out by the data at least - mortgages seem to be the largest component of increase, followed by car loans. Meanwhile "revolving loans" which I assume to mean payday-loan-style debt, shrunk enormously starting in 2020. People are probably pretty likely to correlate their debt burden to their personal financial situation, especially debts that have short repayment windows, and a lot of people are doing much better by that metric. This is the part of "your financial situation" that people have the most agency or sense of responsibility about, even beyond income/wages or whatever. It doesn't inherently explain the decoupling from "my situation" to "the economy as a whole", but it does provide at least one factor that could explain personal optimism but bad economy vibes. If you were on the payday loan treadmill but got off it as a result of pandemic assistance and now don't have that source of precarity, it is easy to see how you might consider your personal economic situation to be much improved. At the same time, since that change wasn't the result of career advancement or wage improvement, it may be that people don't think of that as "the economy", and it would also explain consumer spending increases to some degree. Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Because it isn't accurate for an individual. Nobody is getting raises to match inflation at. To get that benefit you have to get a new job with more pay, which means nobody making minimum wage saw any raise in wages and just got to enjoy getting kicked in the balls by inflation. But just because they have the opportunity to have a wage increase everything is just fine according to the experts. This is just wrong: if you work minimum wage you almost certain have changed jobs since 2020, you probably got fired or hours cut during the pandemic and had every opportunity to switch jobs as a result. There's a reason those are the sectors that have since huge nominal increases and decent real increases in wages. It's nonsense to try to say that service workers are the ones kicked in the balls on wages when the data shows that it mostly is the income range for salaried workers that got hosed. Hourly work is exceptionally easy to quit and start elsewhere - that's probably a big reason why the wage increases are concentrated there! Groups that change jobs infrequently are much more likely to be impacted - if you have to wait until annual review for any pay changes and you don't feel like quitting after one year of bad raises, then you are gonna lose income compared to people that are working part-time and are fine to just pick a different job to work. In the long-run the rich will figure out how to get richer, but it seems like for now at least the sudden spike in inflation has caught higher earners off guard because we had such a long period of ~1% inflation. People may take a minute to figure out how to say "no" to a 2% pay bump, but hourly workers are entertaining job offers every time they walk into a store with a "now hiring" sign, and in my experience all of those have the starting pay printed right on them - good loving luck doing the same for salaries. If you want to make an argument about people losing out, the class of people to focus on is probably tipped workers and/or undocumented workers - those people have no real relationship to the minimum wage though, and bringing it up is a red herring BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Dec 7, 2023 |
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Dec 7, 2023 18:31
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I stopped listening to your argument right here. Literally working hourly right now my man - and you are statistically wrong. Here's some analysis about how wage gains were happening and who was moving jobs in 2022 from pew: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/07/28/majority-of-u-s-workers-changing-jobs-are-seeing-real-wage-gains/ Notice especially how education level and age have a strong predictive effect. It's not that changing jobs is pleasant, but it is easier if your goal is to work in retail or a similar sector. There is a larger pool of potential employers, and the interview process is usually one stage. In contrast, if you are job hunting in tech it usually takes 2 or even 3 interviews, you are likely to have to do a fuckload of work on your resume and accomplishments, and if you stay out of the sector for any length of time you will never get back in. This isn't dissing people that have legit trouble with finding jobs, or otherwise saying that salaried work is better or superior, but there are a lot more openings for retail or food service than for geological surveyor or whatever, and the more you specialize your skill set the more difficult it is to say "gently caress you, I'm gonna work for the other guy". Sometimes there is no other guy, or the other guy is on the opposite coast. Normally, having that level of replaceability and lack of job security is ONLY bad - but for the last several years it has actually led to people working hourly having a lot more say because you can jump ship and have most of your skills transfer reignonyourparade posted:Making more money for less work than any point in my life as one of those below median low skilled workers very explicitly because my boss is desperate to keep me around because he can't hire anyone* and I very much doubt he's offering that much below market if he's being willing to bump the lay of rhe people he does have kn response, very much does not seem like lots of people who want few available jobs to me. This guy has leveraged his labor, and so have all the people that said "gently caress that, I can make the same amount with less physical labor". BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Dec 7, 2023 |
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Dec 7, 2023 23:31
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Staluigi posted:Bark bark bark bark woof woof Also, as long as we are at it, weren't there actual goddamn explosives planted around DC that day by one or more of the participants? Broken windows are whatever, you have insurance for a reason, but if someone sets off a goddamn bomb that is a whole other ball game in terms of lethality and potential damage
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Dec 12, 2023 16:36
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:Not sure at all which is why I’m wondering if they’d have the vote if they didn’t know it’ll pass. They did seem to have a few people briefing to the media that it was overblown, though I don't have the article handy (it was posted maybe 5-10 pages ago?). Even if they fail to get the majority though, it still might make #hunterbiden trend or whatever though, and articles will probably include that he is on trial for tax fraud and got the plea deal rescinded or whatever. I think they are trying to keep the oxygen on the fire, even if they don't have any more wood. The bad news is that the actual trial for Hunter will be active going into next year, and what they want is for that to be getting parallel coverage to Trump. If Hunter gets cleared and Trump doesn't they will run with "political bias", if both are guilty they will run with "he does it too", and if Trump gets off they run with "vindicated". Obviously Hunter and Joe are two different people and they have basically no evidence that Joe was aware of any of this. That won't make a difference to the people they are trying to whip into a frenzy - the ticker will just say BIDEN JAILED FOR TAX FRAUD or whatever and no one is going to change their mind when you say "no, that was Hunter, Joe didn't do anything" With the personalization of news media I don't think there is any meaningful consequences for doing this - Joe Biden doesn't have enough of an approval rating among independent voters for this to galvanize them or anything like that. The people who get served the incendiary articles are going to be the ones predisposed to believe it without question, so there's not going to be any blowback. The desired endpoint of this is getting persuadable people to say "politics is just backbiting nonsense, everyone is playing games" and lower turnout numbers back down, since they can't reliably win with a political minority otherwise. That said, it probably is impossible to really do that to the extent needed - they hosed it by pissing off the white suburban women with overturning Roe, and the stories about a woman fleeing Texas will get an equal or greater amount of play in the "people who already agree" media space on the Dems side. Obviously the polling numbers are bad right now and all, but having the advantage on non-presidential years for ages is how the Republicans got so enmeshed in state government and Congress, and it isn't as though they are running on the right things to sway swing states. It's possible that Trump will run on "I wrote you a check for the pandemic", but the rest of the party will definitely not make any promises to that effect, so even if the bad economics vibes persist I don't think they will be saying the right words to ride that wave. For what it matters, I think Biden will probably be able to take Michigan even if he loses voters in Arab communities because the automaker union wins were pretty big, and he has the right sort of reputation to do that kind of campaigning - Whitmer also seems to be pretty effective. Arizona has also had the governor flip recently, and I expect that might give a slight boost as well. Filling Sinema's seat will probably drive turnout there as well. It's maybe too early to have too much real analysis of all this, I don't know when the polls start being predictive but we probably aren't there yet. Still, I think the media environment is worth watching, and from what I can tell it seems like Trump's trial schedule will probably continue to be the biggest story for everyone but Fox next year, and stuff like this has no real poo poo of picking up steam like the Clinton email stuff did in 2016 - it will get Fox airtime, but I don't think it has any shot of being more than that
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Dec 12, 2023 17:45
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Eric Cantonese posted:I'm not naturally photogenic and I hate taking pictures of myself, but having the right profile photos is key and I don't know if a younger me would have had the wherewithal for that. Great post/av combo. There's definitely a lot of different things you can take away from this. I think the death of the high school sweetheart probably relates to people aiming to pair up later in life now - that's been a long-running trend basically since women entered the workforce. Similarly, I do think the decrease in people meeting at work probably does have a lot to do with the culture around workplace romance getting clamped down on as people recognize issues of power dynamics and just overall awkwardness if it goes poorly. Another thing I will say though is that now that online dating isn't so niche it makes sense that it would be rapidly growing. The network effects of dating apps are really powerful and important in all the same ways they are for social media like Facebook. It's also helped along by recent generations crowding into cities for colleges and careers. It makes perfect sense that you would meet your partner in-person if you live in a small town - you might actually have gone to high school with most of the other people within a couple years of you in age. It makes NO sense if you moved for college - virtually no one you socialize with during those years will have gone to the same high school. On top of that, once you finish your degree you are fairly likely to move again, at least for any college not located in a major city. Given the amount of moving that the average person is going to be doing, it makes a lot of sense that online dating becomes more important. Even beyond that though, the numbers alone make a pretty compelling argument - if your dating pool is only people you have directly met and socialized with, then maybe generously it is 100 people, and that isn't getting into any specifics about compatibility or who is single or within your age range. For people living in or near a big city, any lively dating app will be many times that number, and you can safely assume some basic levels of compatibility (is single, is interested in dating) and you can filter to get additional levels (shared interests, mutually attractive, etc). Frankly, the math on that seems to make inevitable that more people probably settled for matches that weren't great at the outset and grew into the relationship (or didn't) over time in the past. The history of marriage as a political and economic arrangement as much of a romantic one supports this to some degree (obviously this is culture-dependent but I think we can agree that the US trend has been away from this over time). Basically, there probably were a lot of people who would take a 75% match if it meant they could get the associated household stability whereas now people actually have the option to look for a better fit, in part because you don't have to rely on such limited methods of socialization Here's another thing to chew on - considering the segregated nature of US communities, online dating probably has played an important role in integration and social mobility. When people only marry within their social circles, the default assumption is that a lot of things will self-reinforce - household wealth, education level, and race are all pretty geographically predictable, so if you marry someone who grew up in the same school district you are likely to be pretty close together on all of these factors. Colleges may be a bit more diverse since people will be coming from different places, but obviously most people that meet at Yale or whatever are going to be predictably well-positioned. In contrast, if you are going solely off mutual attractiveness and shared interests you are more likely to meet someone that isn't identical in all those categories. Traveling even a mile in most cities can take you from a business district or commuter suburb to the old downtown or poorly-maintained ex-industrial areas. In daily life, you aren't as likely to be going to the same places (job, college, bars), but unless race, socioeconomic status, or formal education are explicit factors you care about you could easily be totally compatible with someone who is different on all of those axes. I can't necessarily say that correlation equals causation, especially since there are other underlying trends (younger generations being less white, for instance) that could be relevant. It's bears thinking about though, because school and neighborhood segregation have not really improved much if at all since the 80s, but interracial marriages keep going up.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:48
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Eric Cantonese posted:Dating a coworker is a 21st century HR nightmare. I'm not surprised at all to see that having gone down the toilet as an avenue for meeting a romantic relationship partner. To be COMPLETELY fair, meeting through work doesn't require you to be coworkers. The coding doc that Leon shared makes it clear that it could also include people you meet who work for another company that you meet at a conference, or a courier or truck driver that delivers to you. It also includes work neighbors, like if you meet at the food trucks and find out your office is in the next building over You also only need to have MET in that way, even if you start dating much later. If you met working at McDonalds and then quit that job to do something better, you still met "at work". All of that said, I'm sure the gross version was happening plenty in the past, so we can definitely be glad that sort of thing is frowned upon now. I found out early in my adulthood that my parents had met in a way that makes me feel fundamentally uncomfortable - they were married for over a decade before eventually divorcing amicably, so outcomes-wise it wasn't the worst, but the version of the story I got growing up had put the time they started dating a couple years later because my mom KNEW how bad it looked. Nowadays if you want to date an older man you can just find one online instead of picking an authority figure.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:31
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I know we joke about treating politics as a team sport, but I think there are some places where the analogy kind of makes sense. As far as the narrative, Obama had the "first round pick directly into franchise starter" sort of vibe, whereas even in 2020 Biden sort of felt like "career backup forced into the position of starter". Honestly, I think part of it is that it was in 2016 and even into like 2019 a lot of the media coverage on Biden was basically "he doesn't really want to be in the public eye and isn't running for office because of grief around Beau's death". The man himself didn't really seem to want to be president until push came to shove and there wasn't any obvious frontrunner to fill the vacuum left by Hillary in 2016. I don't think there's much point in revisiting "centrist Voltron" or whatever, but most of the people running in 2020 had no business being there. The decisive dropouts were, like, Warren and Buttigieg. Buttigieg was literally trying to run for president on the back of being mayor of South Bend, IN and Warren is a slightly lefter Clinton - she was going to get absolutely ripped to shreds as soon as she had to think on her feet and being from MA does you no favors on the national stage. Bernie is great, but being literally older than Biden makes it REALLY hard to picture him running in 2024 - I can't imagine 4 years as president would have been kind to him any more than it has to Biden. Again, we revisit this point constantly, but the whole gerontocracy vs kakistocracy aspect of US politics is really exhausting. I hope by 2028 the generational turnover happens enough that we can start having somewhat-old candidates instead of ANCIENT candidates. I can fully appreciate why people don't feel all that enthusiastic about voting for Biden even while maintaining the importance of doing it anyway
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Dec 22, 2023 22:41
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Even separate from whatever is going on with this particular small hands thing, we know Trump is obsessed with approval and acceptance because of basically everything else he's ever done. Remember John Barron and all the times he would get things into tabloids from "anonymous sources"? Oh, and the time he cashed a check for $1 or whatever that story was. Basically everything about the man suggests that yes, he is exactly petty enough to spend years with "short-fingered vulgarian" echoing in his head. That said, the Lincoln project poo poo is incredibly weak and bad, and the inciting event for Trump running in the first place was getting roasted at a White House dinner when Obama was in office, so I'm not really convinced that mocking him publicly is going to cause him to lose the election or make a "mistake". It'll definitely piss him off and might feature in some new word salad, but if the word salad in and of itself wasn't repulsing his supporters then I don't see what the point of this is. Basically, at best, it seems like it might make us feel good to know that Trump is unhappy about it, but it hardly even counts as a political thing. If anything, having these kinds of pointless attacks taking up airtime makes it easier to lump his ongoing legal troubles in the same basket - when Trump says "VERY UNFAIR" his audience agrees.
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Dec 25, 2023 17:34
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