HaroldWilson
4mo ago
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
"for the sake of the institutions"
Come on. I think if we look, for instance, at political institutions the right has done just as much defecting as progressives. Gerrymandering obviously happens on both sides but Republicans are overall more aggressive and net more seats from it, the absurd hypocrisy over Supreme Court nominations in final Presidential years, Trump/Jan 6/election fraud nonsense and the list goes on.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born
Well however young you are I'd suggest if you think that you should look harder. There are plenty of conservatives in prestigious history departments across the Anglosphere.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well then even if 'into that shit' was a mild exaggeration, you're more or less agreeing with the sentiment that for Trump supporters his being guilty of insurrection is not something that would notably dissuade them from sticking with him.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened
His contempt for democracy was already pretty evident before Jan 6th. Pre-Jan 6th anti-Trump feeling wasn't unjustified because Jan 6 hadn't happened yet; Jan 6 was Trump 'hysteria' being proven right! To embrace Godwin's law, this is the equivalent of saying that anti-Hitler sentiment was baseless before 1933 because it was only then that he was able to make any effective attack on democracy. People warned that Trump had no respect for democracy, and they were right. This was 2016;
First of all, it’s rigged and I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, to be honest
I have had to come to the conclusion that the rage was all over It's Her Turn Now
This is trivially disproved by the number of people who hate Trump who also dislike Clinton, from the Democratic left to the Never Trump Republicans. The former is obvious but it's also true in the case of the latter; McMullin called Hillary 'terrible' in 2016, French wrote a piece in July 2016 harshly critical of Clinton on the emails and saying Comey should charge her etc. etc.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well you can always rationalise any outcome if you're deeply committed to Trump, which is the entire problem really. If Trump is jailed, then Ok some people will say that he isn't actually guilty and the blob/Democratic establishment got him on phony charges, but if he isn't convicted then those same people will say that it proves the charges were fake and politically motivated in the first place. There is no result anymore that would possibly change the view of any committed Trump supporter.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well the issue is that there is no way for the state to reliably ensure that those other than agents of the state are the people we want to benefit from asymmetry of force; or, a relaxed policy on firearms would mean the attacker too has access to the same force as you do. Constriction of the overall supply of firearms and strict policing of that supply is the only way to keep them out of the hands of those for whom we want to do so.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Given that such a system would require the state to maintain to the same extent as a strict licensing regime, surely all that is being preserved here is the illusion of liberty? If you have no issue with the state being able to demand you insure yourself before driving, drawing some line between there and the state being able to demand you demonstrate yourself a competent and trustworthy driver seems arbitrary and pointless.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
ridiculous excuse
How is this a 'ridiculous' excuse? The road network as it is today only exists thanks to the government, why should it then not be able to regulate who can drive, and how they can do it, on the roads they are largely responsible for? I for one am glad to be free (or freer than I otherwise would be) from a drunkard killing me in his car, all so that a few cranks can delude themselves about how much liberty they have.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well I suppose that's bad news for people who want to break the law when driving, for the rest of us though it's a good if such drivers are off the roads.
but it doesn’t have to be this way,
This is simply correct. It doesn't.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
In my ideal world victims would apply enough force to end crimes as they occur.
Not what I said. The state/police doesn't just attempt to stop crimes in progress, they arrest suspects after the fact, obviously, mostly when no agent of the state was present at the time of the crime. Should private citizens go round trying to do that as well?
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
This is absurd. Should any citizen take upon himself to become their own policemen and start 'arresting' under threat of force everyone they suspect of committing a crime?
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
This is such a lame charge of hypocrisy. It's as stupid as saying that it's hypocrisy for gun control advocates to want the military to have access to weaponry; of course there will be exceptions but the point is that those should be tightly controlled by the state - an asymmetry of force in which those guarding politicians have more at their disposal than their would be attackers is a good thing.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Make that at least 10! Are there any replies to his comment that he can actually see?
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
This rather puts in perspective the endless mockery that both ordinary people and the mainstream media get here; turns out all the Very Smart People here are just as capable of pulling mid-afternoon Fox News level arguments out of their other cheeks as anyone else. 'Inflation is coming down? Tell that to my local chicken prices'.
As ever, Lord Kelvin's words bear remembering - if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. If you're going to rubbish one set of statistics, you really must have an alternative better than your own reckonings and guesses.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
This is indeed tedious; specifically, it's tedious for so many people in this thread to sling shit about economic statistics without ever actually clarifying what their problem is. If you tell me a key statistics is being manipulated, it's hardly unreasonable for me to ask how.
What do you want me to say?
I want you to tell me HOW it is gamed.
Note that it so obviously lacks objective criteria that BLS has to publish several versions to keep up with all their competing ideas about how to measure it.
Yes, economic metrics, especially something like inflation, are indeed difficult to measure with total accuracy. What is the easy and simple way of measuring inflation that you seem to think exists? I'd rather hear from the analysts in the arena who actually try to do a good job than someone who makes unsubstantiated criticisms of statistics despite having nothing to contribute on the subject himself.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Well if you look at the graph from up the thread, it shows that debt is levelling off.
In any case, would you disagree that the early 2000s were a 'good economy'.
Real wages are important so far as they let people lead satisfying and meaningful lives, but they're not what actually make people happy or give them meaning in their lives. Family formation, getting onto the property ladder - these are much better indicators of human thriving than real wage numbers. You're totally right when you say that we should be measuring what we actually want to measure, which is why I look at the statistics I do.
This is perfectly reasonable, but then you are straying considerably from the question of 'is this a good economy' as most Americans would conceive it. On the basis of home ownership and family formation, 1982 was better year than 1995, yet surely only a madman would suggest that the former year represented a 'better economy' than the latter year. Claiming that the economy is doing well at the moment doesn't mean one is claiming 'society', broadly construed, in improving, though I would argue that the latter is indeed true.
Energy usage is the basis of almost all economic activity - and that number is DOWN. Technically if you go by energy usage rates the USA didn't actually recover entirely from the 2007 economic collapse. I find that fairly plausible, given that there weren't armies of fentanyl zombies and giant homeless tent cities before then.
Well when I said source I meant a source for the fact that energy consumption is down, but doesn't matter now, I've found one. However, not only, it transpires, has energy consumption been flat since 2008, it was also flat (not even accounting for population) between 2000 and 2007/8, which is impossible to account for unless we accept that energy consumption is not a reliable indicator of prosperity from year to year. Over the long run of course more prosperity is usually accompanied by more energy consumption, but on a short-term basis it is evidently less than ideal as a measure.
Why aren't people having children anymore? Why is there a giant fentanyl crisis? Why are people so miserable(women especially)? Why is political extremism and polarisation increasing at such a rapid clip? Why is there a massive illegal immigrant population and what are they doing to wages? Why is domestic infrastructure falling apart? Why are politics so hopelessly corrupt? There are giant blinking warning lights and sirens sounding all over society, and these things simply would not be happening if society was economically successful and doing well in the way that your real wage statistics are claiming. This is why I'm distrustful of statistics that claim that everything is hunky dory - because if I look at US society as a whole I see a society in crisis/collapse, and yet the statistics you're talking about are claiming that everything is better than fine.
There are two things to add here. The first is the same point as above. It may indeed be that economic growth is no longer the best way to improve human happiness. However that is no reason to deny the fact that these are relatively good economic times now. The second is that I find this roundabout question-asking method of argumentation less than convincing; if you are going make a charge as serious as you do about economic statistics, I expect you to be able to point to where and how the statistics are being manipulated, or how they are wrong and misleading. Look at this way, how are your beliefs falsifiable? What evidence or statistics could I present that would make you change your mind? If the answer is nothing, then why shouldn't everyone just dismiss you as a hack?
In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury
If you want to live like a 1960s American, with a 1960s standard of living, you absolutely can still do this with much greater ease. Go to a regional mid/small-sized city and you can live a lot better on one income than the vast majority in the 1960s could. The grain of truth in this characterisation is the rapid increase in housing costs, but if that's the problem, your quarrel is with NIMBY local and state politicians and the people to whom they pander, not Biden.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
I was never suggesting that real wages are the only measure of a healthy society and contended citizenry. Only that it's superior than ECI is making the general assessment of whether Americans are doing better or worse than they were X months/years ago.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
like isn't being compared to like.
It is across time. If u-2 unemployment decreases, even if you think u-4 or u-6 should be the more relevant number, that still reflects an improvement in the economy.
And this goes without various period changes to categorization counting that comes and go with administrations, at which point categorical definition differences are conflated with smuggled insinuations of continuity, which is a not-uncommon way for political actors to imply systemic changes when the primary change in a system is the measurment.
Any specific evidence for this happening?
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Ok but a situation resembling the one you show seems unlikely. The American economy is a sufficiently closed system (plenty of immigration, but how much of that is high skill, enough to make a difference?) that any change in composition is principally not a question of movement by new people into the statistics, one would imagine. Which is to say that compositional changes are helping mostly incumbents rather than new arrivals as in your example.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
What's the alternative to changing the basket of goods as consumer's change their behaviour. Or should we still have a Marconi Wireless and pipe tobacco in the basket?
The unemployment thing doesn't matter as long as you compare like with like. The various unemployment numbers tend to track each other very closely.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
It is almost literally impossible these days to find a vehicle with <100k miles for <$10k
I would hardly deny that buying cars is more expensive now that several years ago, but the increase has been nothing like on the scale you're implying. Again, numbers are your friend. Since Biden took office average used car prices have gone up somewhere around 25%. That's bad, not even close to the over 2x increase you are suggesting.
And if you to any online second hand car website you can find stacks upon stacks of car with under 100k miles for well under 10k.
Edit: wrong link, correct one here https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02
The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference; certainly not enough to warrant paying a premium. If you did put generic vegetable oil in a fancy bottle, I doubt anybody who wasn't some kind of expert/chef would actually notice any difference. Indeed, they presumably use generic bulk stuff in actual kitchens, even in nice restaurants, so it should be good enough for you or I at home.
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