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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   27965 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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What are some other factors that could explain Trump’s victory, besides “Kamala is unlikable”? It sucks that we can’t determine how Trump won as the pollsters are too inaccurate, but we can still make guesses.

I think that the rise in scrolling-based media (tik tok, reels) has made non-political social media content significantly more addicting than the political media of the 10s and news in general. This reduces the number of people engaging in online political content, and reduces the political engagement of those whose political information came via online spectacles. For a variety of reasons I think that Democrats have relied on more “addictive internet content” to recruit votes, as for instance the BLM / brutality / racism motif of Obama-Hillary-Biden campaigns. George Floyd can’t compete with Moo Deng. Consider that Northwestern study which found that BLM shifted swing state votes more than concern about the economy. If Dems rely on socially contagious hype more than Republicans then they need to fundamentally rethink their strategy in a post-2020 social media environment.

You're overthinking it. It's the economy, stupid. Inflation was the worst ever under Biden, and when pressed, Kamala couldn't identify a single policy difference between herself and Biden. In the counter-factual where everyone feels richer than 4 years ago, we'd have president Harris.

Maybe, but at least one big study found that “declining assessments of personal economic well-being also failed to change voter preferences.” I’m wary of the typical explanations. Do we find that people whose economic position increased in recent years are more likely to vote for the incumbent, and those whose decreased are less likely? Eg, if we look at an industry that “randomly” got more earnings on average, are they more likely to vote for the incumbent?

Inflation in part drove me to go back to big tech from startup land. I’m now making my old salary, barely budged from pre inflation numbers. It’s double the pay for 10X the effort and stress.

I considered relocating to a cheaper home, but rising interest rates make that a nonstarter.

I don’t assign 100% of the blame to Biden, but I definitely think that the Biden stimulus exacerbated the impact of the Fed’s loose money policy, and when they passed it everyone knew it wasn’t necessary.

Isn’t the more direct causation that big tech has replaced you with cheaper foreign workers? Workers who are habituated to a lower quality of life and who may intend to return home with greater purchasing power than you possess with the same wage? Who sometimes live illegally in shared accommodations to reduce the housing burden and who don’t mind being overworked because of cultural differences and who sometimes practice nepotism at your expense? Who may not have the same college debt because they fib about their education? Not that this doesn’t absolve Biden, but the reason (say) FAANG doesn’t pay more is because they don’t have to. We could have had an upper middle class utopia where FAANG sponsors high school and college programming courses and recruits homegrown talent while increasing wages but… no.

I blame the free market fetishists.

I think you are imbibing media narratives. The downward pressure on tech salaries and employment came in the summer of 2022 when banks collapsed, startups imploded, and VC money became tight.

Big tech hires from abroad because there aren’t enough top quality engineers here. We do have programs to grow talent in our own pipelines for non traditional candidates, and internally we say it’s because we’ve literally exhausted the market for engineers that can meet our standards. Google, Meta et al are largely engaged in zero sum struggles for the same relatively small pool of talent.

There’s approx 580k h1-b employees, so it’s impossible that these are all “top quality”. Even if Amazon couldn’t find workers as efficient as the h1-b’s (has this been studied?) they can hire two for the work of one and still have gratuitous profit margins left over. If there are more high wage jobs available to the middle class then wages increase. From BlackRock —

A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labour shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages

Two C players means you’re just dragging down your A players even more than if you’d hired the one. We don’t want them, it would be better to just not hire.

There are apparently employers like Accenture that play games with H1-B to bring in bottom tier talent to work here and grind out garbage tier code. Big Tech is not doing this.

All 8k h1bs that Amazon brought in just last year are “A players”? How do you see two people doing the work of one “dragging down the A players”?

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