OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17hr ago
But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50.
This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.
But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.
The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19hr ago
I think Scott hit the nail on the head when he said that people feel like they need to do more to keep up. People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself. Now you have to compete against the world. I started feeling this way in the 2000's and it's only gotten worse.
Where I disagree with Scott is that CPI is the wonderful and infallible marker of how expensive things have gotten. It's not capturing people's necessary expenses, because necessary expenses have inflated. CPI does hedonistic adjustments.
A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes. The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant. But when the question is, "Do you feel like you can afford more than your parents?" The answer is "no." I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.
The same kinds of adjustments are made for things that legally aren't available anymore. In the past people bought cars without airbags and now we need to buy cars with airbags. The price increase from airbags is factored into the CPI and the CPI says the cost is flat given the upgrade, even if in real dollars it's 5k more. I like having airbags, don't get me wrong. But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."
The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy." Cars with more environmental and safety features, mandatory insurance costs, mandatory home features. Meanwhile jobs feel precarious - one wrong move and you'll be replaced by a foreigner or an AI chatbot and no one else will be hiring. Are we right or wrong to think so? I don't know. But that's the vibes part of the vibecession.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Some of the most productive cities in the US are space-constrained by bays, mountains, etc and there isn't a "drive 20 minutes" cheaper option. There's "Drive 2 hours each way" cheaper options.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
The article seems to think that Greene is asking for the government to interfere by subsidizing families more. However, I have not seen anything of the sort in his articles or his X timeline. Instead, I suspect he's going to recommend building more homes and daycares to lower costs, based on how Part II ended. "We are a nation of builders." (bolded in the original.)
Boehm also says that Greene refuses to acknowledge tradeoffs, but Boehm hasn't provided the numbers for what tradeoffs exist for a couple in their 20s who are hoping to have replacement-rate level children by the time they're 40. Boehm seems to think that children are optional luxuries, ("First, all choices come with tradeoffs, and having kids is no exception.") On the individual level this may be true, but on the societal level this is not true.
Saying "you only need to pay the outrageous cost of childcare for the first 5-10 years of parenthood and then the cost becomes smaller" doesn't lower the barrier to entry at all.
In Part II, Greene added up the percentages of jobs that could support children in Lynchburg, VA, and it came up to 63.6%. This complements perfectly the 36% of people who responded to a Pew Research poll indicating they could not afford kids. This stood out to me as something significant but no one on either side of the debate has commented on it yet. (Edit, this is a mistake on my part, it's 36% of people who don't have kids already who said the reason was they could not afford them, not 36% of the total population of people age 25-45.)
Complaints about the articles I am sympathetic towards:
Greene completely messed up his calculation on Part I by picking the numbers in a county in NJ, instead of actual National Averages. In Part II, his correction to $100,000 seems more accurate.
Greene is really trying to calculate the "Middle Class" line and distinguishing it from the "Working Poor" line. He conflates "Working Poor" with "Impoverished."
The articles being flawed doesn't detract from them being viral and noteworthy. They struck a cord with people.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
What if the goal was to destabilize the US? Andrew Yang used to argue pretty convincingly that Trump's 2016 election was only made possible by the Opioid crisis destroying communities.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
The notorious Far Right rag, the NYT, has issued an article that pretty much backs what I've been saying: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/us/hegseth-drug-boat-strike-order-venezuela.html
According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.
But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.
The two officials questioned whether the surviving people were Admiral Bradley's intended target in the second strike, as opposed to the purported drugs and the disabled vessel. They argued that the purported cargo remained a threat and a lawful military target because another cartel-associated boat might have come to retrieve it.
The boat was the target of the second strike, not the people. Common sense prevails.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Yeah, sure. But I haven't seen evidence of Trump being particularly bloodthirsty, which seems to be the implications being driven at.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
My understanding is that it's actually more complicated, even if there was a strike purposefully for the purpose of killing two shipwrecked hostile non-state actors.
The quote you reference has a citation referring to a specific event where a military stopped and questioned lifeboats fleeing a sunk hospital ship.
After having sank the ship, the commander decided to ascertain whether the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants and approached the surviving lifeboats. After having interrogated them and having found no indication that the Hospital Ship was carrying combatants or munitions, the U-Boat fired at the lifeboats, sinking two out of three.
The citation should not taken to indicate that shooting everyone who's ever been shipwrecked is always illegal. For example, in the specific case referenced in the Manual, if the lifeboats had combatants or munitions it would have been acceptable to kill them. The Manual is giving a specific example of a time when soldiers were found to have committed an illegal act.
That said, I think it is more likely given the facts known now that no such order was given, and instead the order was to destroy the boat after the first strike did not do sufficient damage for mission parameters. The deaths of the narcoterrorists was incidental.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Yes, the renter is worse off. The renter has such a huge barrier to buying a house it might as well be on the moon.
But 1 Million in the stock market would be better than a 1 Million house, can we agree on this much? If your net worth is 1 Million, that doesn't tell us a complete picture of financial health. I think that's all that I'm trying to say here.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Your first comment seemed to be about the new scandal - the double strike. Trump might have had very little to do with the double strike while still not being a "Weekend at Biden."
No, Trump is clearly doing something with Venezuela. But if you want to argue about the whole situation in general, it would require putting forward more of an argument on your part.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Being able to go into debt is not wealth or everyone attending college right now would be worth $100,000.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
You don't need a painting but you need a shelter. You don't need an Apple stock and you can sell it without needing to buy another S&P stock to replace it. I don't think that home value increases are wealth in the sense a good stock and bond portfolio is, but they are often treated as such in economic calculations. Accessing that wealth requires lowering a standard of living in some way that isn't replicated with other assets.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Are you denying that homeowners who have there house values massively increase aren't richer?
No, I acknowledge that a homeowner who has had a large home where the value massively increased can downsize when the kids are out and add the difference to their retirement. But I disagree that reverse mortgages and HELOCs are "wealth." Yes, it is possible if someone is lucky to have been born at certain times to leverage home values and buy rentals and extract economic rent that way.
What I don't think, and what I think the article author is trying to get at, is that home value increases are wealth in the sense a good stock and bond portfolio is, but they are often treated as such in economic calculations. Accessing that wealth requires lowering a standard of living in some way.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Your own source says, "President Donald Trump, who is holding a meeting about Venezuela with his national security team later in the day, said on Sunday that he would not have wanted a second strike on the boat." So I'm not sure why your follow up questions are on Trump.
The Washington Post story is, "The Washington Post had reported that a second strike was ordered to take out two survivors from the initial strike and to comply with an order by Hegseth that everyone be killed."
Sean Parnell (Assistant to the SECWAR, Chief Pentagon Spokesman & Senior Advisor ) said, "We told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday."
You seem to be implying that Leavitt's comment contradicts this:
"Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated," Leavitt said.
However, Leavitt's statement is not the Washington Post story. It actually contradicts it by placing the emphasis on the destruction of the boat, not the killing of the two survivors of the first attack.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
A lot of people complained about that, and it's really his fault but Part I is actually kind of Part 1.5. He wrote an article earlier about affording a home in Essex County, NJ, and used the numbers from MIT's Living Wage analysis for Essex County, New Jersey in his calculation. He wasn't expecting the article to go beyond his readership so he didn't really explain that part well until Part II.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
The value isn't increasing in the same way as other assets. He compares it to a painting:
If you own a painting and it goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000, you are now wealthy. You do not need the painting to survive. You can sell the painting, buy a house, and live off the proceeds.
Whereas, if you have a house increase in value, you can't sell it for that full value and pocket the proceeds. You need to live somewhere:
If you sell the house to “realize” your wealth, you are homeless. You must enter the market to buy a replacement machine. But because all the machines repriced in correlation, your $600,000 gain is immediately consumed by the purchase of the new, equally expensive house.
The only way to unlock that wealth is to:
Die.
Downsize (move to a cheaper region, sacrificing income/opportunity/quality of life).
Borrow against it (HELOC or reverse mortgage), which turns your equity back into debt.
All three represent either a loss of utility or a conversion back into debt.
The fact that a person who doesn't own a house is in an even worse position does not negate that home inflation shouldn't really be considered the same as other assets.
Don't compare it from No home to Has home. Compare between a world where homes inflated 10x to one where homes only inflated 2x. Which world has generated more "wealth?"
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Reminds me of this viral Substack series: Part 1, Part 2..
If you own a painting and it goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000, you are now wealthy. You do not need the painting to survive. You can sell the painting, buy a house, and live off the proceeds.
But if the home you live in goes from $200,000 to $1,000,000, you are not wealthy, because the replacement home also costs $1M. You are trapped. You cannot sell the house and take the profit, because you still need a place to sleep, and the house across the street also costs $1,000,000.
You haven’t gained purchasing power. You have simply experienced a revaluation of your Cost of Living.
...
For the middle class, rising home prices are not “Wealth Accumulation.” They are Asset Price Inflation. We have confused the capitalized cost of future rent with an asset. When housing prices triple relative to wages, we haven’t made homeowners rich; we have made non-owners poor. We pulled up the ladder and called it “Net Worth.”
The median age of first time homebuying has gone up from 28 in the 1990s to 40. First-time buyers now comprise just 21% of all home purchases.
Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.
Ok, but then who are the elderly selling to? People in their 40s able and willing to get into tons of debt. OK, but who buys when you exhaust that group? Property investment firms who are able to rent the houses out. Can that go on forever? Well, if they're buying houses at a certain price, they're hoping the rent will be more than the mortgage over the length of the life of the home. This happens when rents increase over time. Will we always have more people looking for homes than there are available?
To put a finer point on it, it seems like the system requires that there be perpetually fewer homes than desired, but this is not really desirable as a society because we like when everyone has a home and punish people who do not have a residence. And, regardless of what's good or bad or anyone's wishes, eventually the population will decrease as the boomers die off.
Home prices have to fall, right? And I wouldn't even be mad about it, though I'd be one of those holding the bag. I'd like for my kids to afford a home. I'd put me in a precarious financial position until the bulk of the principle is payed off. But I will pay the monthly amount I agreed to pay because I'm an adult, and I'll be happy to see my kids in a better position than me because I'm a normal human being.
But anyone who was hoping to trade their $800,000 home for 8 months in hospice care might be in for a rude awakening.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell picks up in the last third. I haven't decided if it was worth reading.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
On the more philosophical side of things:
Brief, 1 hour interview with a Gender Philosopher: https://youtube.com/live/w8D5tyvodSM?si=1tORdLvMpXnTDLLi
Extended discussion/book club on Gender from a Catholic lens (but holy shit I learned so much about contemporary "queering the gender norm" academics): Season 1, Season 2.
On the more medical side of things: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/
https://old.reddit.com/r/detrans/comments/hp0ee4/so_im_actually_a_doctor_who_specializes_in/
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
He's nuts, for sure, but even crazy people have some kind of internal logic . I'm not asking, "Why did he attack the National Guards?" I'm asking, "Why did he attack the National Guard in DC instead of the ones in Portland, California, Chicago, Tennessee, etc." Or is DC the only place they are actually deployed, in which case what is with the Liberal histrionics?
Why did Lakanwal drive all the way to DC to shoot two National Guardsman? There were many other National Guard deployments between his home and DC. Edit: I'm not questioning his motive to kill members of the NG. I'm questioning why he drove 40 hours from Washington State to Washington D.C.
Guess 1: It's symbolic. DC is more "America" than Portland and the attack was against America. But if so, why not wait one more day and do it on Thanksgiving proper? Even more symbolic that way.
Guess 2: It's a probing attack for a bigger event later on. Probably shouldn't have let himself get taken alive if that's the case...
Guess 3: He had a personal beef against one of the Guardsmen? Was one of them deployed in Afghanistan, he saw them on the TV once, and made it his mission to take revenge for something?
Guess 4: He is actually a Trump agent. After the "Sedition" video, Trump activated him to attack a couple national guards to show his opponents just how dangerous it is to call the military the enemies of the American people. No one was supposed to get really hurt...
Guess 5: He's actually the most patriotic of Americans and took it upon himself to lead the uprising of the American people against the Tyrannical Trump regime, as prompted by the "Sedition" video.
If you can't tell, my guesses are getting wilder and wilder, because I haven't settled on anything I find very plausible. Anyone else feel the same?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Is MTG all that important to Republicans? I haven't seen much than a passing, "huh."
Marjorie Taylor Greene had an average 24% Approval Rating among Republicans. Most Republicans didn't recognize her name in a poll:
Most who were asked about Greene said that they had no opinion of the congresswoman. Republicans were less likely to be aware of or have an opinion about Greene than Democrats, with 64 percent of Democrats weighing in compared to only 44 percent of Republicans.
Greene is more important to Democrats to show how crazy Republicans are, than she is to Republicans who largely don't think about her at all.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
14d ago
Right now, the threats to our constitution are not just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.
How else do you interpret this sentence?
Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.
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