Lmao

I think most of the people are actually reasonable. It’s just easier to get in discussions and stay in them with the unreasonable people than it is with the reasonable people.

That makes sense, but not very relevant to my point. To a working class person, the big three items in their budget are food, energy and housing. Therefore to them, core inflation being X% implies that at some point they’ll look at the items in their budget and find that they inflated X%. It doesn’t, however, say anything about their present state, which is that everything is expensive as hell. The core issue here is that “at some point” isn’t “now”. The DNC missed that distinction in their campaigning strategy, and bragged about their (sort of real, to be fair) accomplishments rather than doing damage control.

Yeah. This is completely true. The Democrats pulled off some genuinely impressive economic things, among them controlling inflation, but then they fucked up any chance that the messaging would hit by talking about how they “brought inflation back down.” To an economist, that’s true: Things used to cost 7% more every year, and now they cost 3% more every year. That’s not how any normal person looks at “inflation” though. To the average person, inflation has “gone back down” once eggs and meat go back to what they used to cost.

I think if Biden had done half as much about climate change, and half as much for working-class wages, and gone after grocery stores to get them to stop price-gouging (like actually threatened the hell out of them with the federal governments’ lawyers Bernie Sanders-style and made a big stink about how he was doing it), he would have won the election. He and his team did do a bunch of really important things for working people in this country. But they also just don’t understand how the average person looks at it, apparently, or how to communicate effectively about what they did.

I sort of wish the news media would do its job, and bridge that gap instead of actively working to make people’s misunderstandings of the world worse, but that seems unlikely to change. Especially now. I was extremely creeped out to realize that a lot of the statistics about this stuff, and news stories I remember reading about it, are much harder to find on Google now, and I wonder if that is on purpose. I think it might be.

You’re using 2019-2023 wage growth with 2021-2025 inflation, so this comparison is meaningless. Now I actually can’t find 2021-2025 (or 2021-2024 for that matter) wage growth numbers, but they’re probably not 30%.

Why do you assume they are not?

It looks to me like, if you look 2021-2024, 10th percentile wages went up by 25%. You can download the Excel sheet at https://www.bls.gov/ecec/factsheets/compensation-percentile-estimates.htm under “The complete set of estimates and relative standard errors are available in Excel.”, from the very end. You want the second line “Civilian workers / Wages and Salaries.” It went from $11.26 to $14.06 (current dollars), so 24.8% up.

If you look on https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ for inflation over the same period, it looks like 2021-2024 inflation was 15%. So they beat inflation by about 10% if you constrain the periods to be the same.

Yes, but why do the voters think that? The voters in America thought that Trump would be better on the economy. Why on earth did they think that? It’s a very weird thing for them to think. They have a lot of those weird beliefs that definitely aren’t reality, and have to come from somewhere. Or, maybe they have some kind of grain of truth, but they get blown up into these hugely important things, that emotionally resonate. “He’s arrogant and out of touch” is a perfect example of one of those things.

Like I say, I’m not saying the voters don’t genuinely think that. I am asking where they got that idea.

I actually don’t know the answer, even as far as America and Trump being good for the economy. And I don’t think the answer for America, at least about that instance, is clearly “Russians,” for what it’s worth. And also yes I am totally uninformed about Canadian politics. I just know that with these kind of vibes-based judgements about politicians, it’s almost always based on some kind of bullshit.

• George Bush is the kind of guy you can have a beer with
• John Kerry is aloof and arrogant
• Al Gore is kooky and also arrogant
• Donald Trump is good at business, he can fix the economy

That kind of thing. It’s very malleable. You might as well say that Trudeau is a man of the people, because he was a drama teacher, and this other guy is from a bank, he’s a banker, he’s greedy, he’s everything that’s wrong with society today. It’s just kind of vibes and random judgements. Or, at least, when I look at it within American politics, that’s what it is.

None of what you said is really contradictory to anything I said. Everything you just said makes perfect sense. I said it looks like a human did a bunch of them, and did a pretty excellent / creative job, and then that gen AI did some of the vast selection of others.

I think I laid out pretty clearly why I think that. Jennifer Daniel didn’t make the fairy picture with a square sunset for a head and also a square sunset on the tip of its wand. For another thing, there are about 186,000 combinations of 2 of the 610 emojis on offer for this tool. It seems unlikely to me that any single human being would do every single one. It would start to multiply into years of full-time work time spent on them pretty quickly, even with some automation, and there are clearly AI tools that can fill in a bunch of the non-critical-to-get-perfect ones, so why not. Some seem clearly likely to be from a human, some sort of look like automated templates that aren’t gen AI (like the alternatives next to a “downward chart trend line”), and some are gen AI.

Anyway, I’m not trying to argue with you. I agree with most of what you said including that the human-generated ones are awesome, which is why I posted this.

Plenty of US right wing and oil funding for destabilizing Canada, all the while supporting the demonism of war on Russia, by pretending that high diesel/home heating fuel was the result of carbon tax.

full CIA puppetry of all western political leaders

US wants Greenland to gift it to Russia

Trudeau and his Liberal party were seen as arrogant and out of touch. I don’t know that Carney is any better in that regard given his ties to the big shitty businesses which are ruining our society, but he’s certainly more financially literate than Trudeau was and people want that right now. He’s certainly qualified for the job.

See this is exactly what I was talking about.

Who decided that the vibe was that Trudeau was “arrogant and out of touch”? Who decided that a totally different politician – surely one who is equally arrogant and out of touch, on a personal level – was “financially literate” and “certainly qualified for the job”?

He didn’t make himself president. He had some natural talents that helped the process along, but being an angry idiot which means he could connect emotionally with a lot of American voters who are also angry idiots was one of them. It’s in no way a counter argument for him being an idiot.

If you fire a sedated turkey buzzard into an airplane engine, that doesn’t make it a skilled mechanic, even if it then makes unprecedented changes to the characteristics of the airplane.

It sure seems like the Russians are just attacking any liberal leader, mounting extensive influence operations to get the ordinary people of their countries to hate them and want to get rid of them (and often to replace them with monsters, if any particular monsters are available).

I have not the first idea at all about Carney, I just know Trudeau. He seemed fine. I also have no particular evidence about the Russians being the ones who are doing all this, but the pattern of liberal leaders having all these wild uprisings against them which gets rid of them in the end seems absolutely unmistakable. And little pieces of the uprisings definitely show a consistent pattern of Russian influence, always in precisely the same direction, when little indications show through the cracks.

And, it definitely seems like a significant problem.

I miss old YouTube.

The look of annoyance and confusion on Kiedis’s face is pure gold.

I did, but it seems you didn’t read what I wrote. To quote myself: Inflation as a statistic is rigged to make things look better than they actually are. The link’s thesis—the idea that “real” wages increased and therefore low-wage workers’ finances materially improved—relies on the false assumption that “real” wages are real, or equivalently that core inflation (which is the method used to calculate inflation in the united states) reflects price changes as experienced by the common person. This assumption is false, because among other things core inflation excludes food and energy, which is… uh… what? Now don’t get me wrong, there are things core inflation is good for, but measuring the lived experience of the working class is not one of them.

I’m familiar with this talking point. It’s actually brilliant. So core inflation does exclude food and energy (as well as housing), mostly because their prices swing up and down in ways that would add noise to the metric. And so, there’s an argument that the real level of inflation would be much higher if only they were included.

The problem is that the premise is completely accurate (“inflation” level excludes important things like energy and food), but the idea that inflation would be way different if they were included makes perfect sense, but it isn’t true. The prices of things that are excluded have been rising at about the same rate (on a timescale as years go by) as the prices of things that are not excluded. Even for housing, which is a little surprising.

Look. I’m not making it up:

https://www.in2013dollars.com/Meats/price-inflation/2021-to-2025?amount=100

That’s the percent inflation in meat over the time Biden was president. It’s 15% cumulative. Your low-income worker who made 30% more, nominally, is able to buy 15% more meat now then they were in 2020.

You can look at the graph and see a lot more of the picture, too: There was Covid inflation for 2020 - 2022, and then it dropped right back to as if the whole thing hadn’t happened. The two huge bars in 2021 and 2022 are the only reason it was even 15%. Biden didn’t do that, he actually recovered well enough from the Covid apocalypse and also boosted up wages by enough that low-income people were better by quite a bit than they had been before it all happened, even though he got handed a big shit sandwich at the beginning. Without that shit sandwich, they’d be more like 30% ahead right now. And it happened specifically because of Biden’s deliberate policies, I can send you a couple articles that get into the weeds of the details if you want.

Your numbers (22% nominal and 3% real) for the middle chunk of the graph sound pretty accurate to me. Biden prioritized low-income workers (in particular with short-term-inflationary policies to keep unemployment down), and so the middle part of the graph pretty much kept pace (they gained 3%) but any actual gains they could have made got swallowed up. They still have 3% more, though, and they can buy more meat now though (22% nominal gain over 15% meat inflation). That’s one important reason why food prices are kept out of the overall graph – they might swing either up or down and distort the picture.

Does that make sense? I’m very into this type of analysis. I’m saying that there is a big disconnect, now that we’re talking numbers, between the numbers you are saying and the vibes that they should imply.

Except, it is not a template. Even leaving aside that “put the sunset image in a square and make it a fairy’s head” would never be the template that any human decided to use to combine a butterfly with anything, look at this:

That’s moon + butterfly overlaid with 50% opacity over sunset + butterfly. It’s a different fairy image, not just a different scale, but a different shape with trivial differences. Which there would be no reason at all for other than the generator getting rerun with new parameters for the different input images. It’s gen AI.

but the idea that things got better for them is outright wrong

You didn’t read the link, did you.

I do understand that when you look at vibes, everyone thinks Trump was okay on the economy and Biden was bad. What I am saying is that when you look at the dollars, low-income workers are making a lot more now than they were in 2019. Enough to be comfortably above even absolutely punishing inflation.

It’s perfectly sensible to me to say that because things are still pretty bad, even after their wages jumped by 12% more than inflation took away, they might feel like punishing the people in charge. Especially if they saw a whole bunch of messaging that sold them on the idea that Biden had fucked it all up and Trump was a savvy businessman who might be able to set it right.

And even if we accept the proposition that things did get better for the bottom 10%, there are a whole 80% of the population between the bottom 10% and the top 10%. For those people things undeniably got much worse.

How much, in your world, did wages change for people in that 80%? Median or average, it’s up to you. I want to know what you think the numbers are. Not the vibes, the numbers.

Lemmy edgelords: Bro we don’t need voting, we just need people in the streets

(Elections end)

Lemmy edgelords: Bro this is WAY WAY FUCKING HARDER than voting was

Go back and look at your first two comments when you replied to me here.

You started an argument, and now you’re unhappy that you are in an argument. Okay. If you don’t have an answer for my question, just say something else. It doesn’t have to be “Hey, that’s a really good point, maybe refusing to vote for Democrats until they get better on their own is abundantly proven to be a dogshit strategy, and I should advocate for something else.” Although, you could say that, and we could have a conversation about what a winning strategy could be. Something productive, you know? To me, that would be good.

Too much propaganda has brainwashed people to not understand very simple facts. You’ll note that I don’t allow this as an excuse for our collective failure.

Yeah. This is the real issue. I’m not trying to excuse Democrats for supporting genocide, but also, the fucked-up state of the American electorate where a politician doing anything other than supporting genocide is this incredibly risky proposition, because an overwhelming majority of the American people think the Palestinians are terrorists and Israel is just defending themselves, that’s the real underlying issue.

And yes, it’s not going to get any better unless people like us take responsibility for fixing it. The increasing spread and power of propaganda is a massive problem. It already was a bad problem, when it was the evening news telling people that Israel was the good guys, and it’s gotten exponentially worse since then.

Bro, you patted yourself on the back for fucking over Ukraine, Palestine, and America. I didn’t put those marginalized people in the conversation, you did.

Failure of voters holding them accountable is what turned the party from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to barely left of Trump.

Lol

How did the voters fail to hold them accountable? There was one Democrat that won one single term over those 24 years, until the Democrats finally tacked all the way to the right with Clinton. What are you saying the voters should have done differently? They pursued exactly your strategy.

So only 50% of Democrats think Israel is even “going too far.” Yeah, sounds about right.

He also claimed that the economy was good when it really wasn’t and patted himself on the back for it, which was just… no.

Yeah, tell me about it.

https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explains/the-truth-about-joe-bidens-economy

Oh shit, sorry. Wrong link.

https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/

There we go.

I realize that very few people on Lemmy are in that bottom 10th percentile part of the graph that has that huge growth. Most are tech-savvy people, students, relatively privileged as compared with a lot of the people whose Biden’s policies most directly impacted, so a bunch of the stuff he did was invisible to them. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

I phrased my statement the way I did for a reason: “More Americans support Israel than Palestine.” A lot of the polls about this like to zoom in on little subsets, or ask strange questions like “Do you support a ceasefire?” and then draw some kind of conclusion when a lot of people answer “yes.”

Want to see something that’ll break your heart?

https://apnorc.org/projects/public-opinion-of-the-israel-and-hamas-conflict-nearly-a-year-after-the-october-7th-attacks/

“25% sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians while 15% feel the opposite.”

15%.

It’s not surprising to me that if you zoom in only on the people who voted for Biden, and then chose not to cast a ballot for Harris, that 29% of them were motivated by the propaganda about how Harris was responsible for Gaza. I’m actually surprised the percentage is that low. What I am saying is that:

1. That reflects a success of propaganda. Notice that the other strong option for why they might not have voted for Harris was “the economy,” even though Trump is an objective catastrophe for the economy and Biden pulled off a minor miracle for working people even having come in during still-pretty-apocalyptic conditions with double normal unemployment and a big chunk of people still dependent on Covid assistance.
2. The relevant question isn’t “did some people decide that Harris was responsible for the war in Gaza and decide not to vote as a result.” Of course the answer to that is yes. The question is “did more people decide that, than the people who would have decided that she was supporting terrorism if she took a different position, and made her lose even harder?”

Anyone who didn’t vote against Trump refused to make a clear, strong, ethical stand against genocide.

The messaging which hammered constantly, to a certain audience, on Biden’s complicity in Gaza, was a big part of the effort to get Trump elected. No one knew that he came out swinging for working people in a way that hasn’t been seen since LBJ. No one knew that he took the biggest action on climate change of any American president by almost ten times over. Everyone on Lemmy knew that he was sending Israel weapons, and we heard it every single day.

Is his refusal to break with half a century of American foreign policy which is enabling of genocide, even in the face of an escalation of the genocide and the clear appearance of its finish line on the horizon, a stain on humanity? Sure. Absolutely it is.

Harris didn’t do that, though. The messaging which was originally deployed against Biden (to a certain audience on the activist left; to other audiences it was that he wasn’t doing enough to support Israel or he caused inflation or something else), switched over to Harris with barely a blip, and for some reason people didn’t notice. So no, I am not proud of you for your principled stance, no.

It was a massively idiotic move that either campaign could have avoided with a stupid level of ease, and they chose not to.

I think you’re vastly overestimating the level of humanity of the average American voter.

More Americans support Israel in the “war” than support Palestine. The same messaging that convinced them that Trump was better on the economy could easily have convinced them that Harris was in bed with “terrorists,” if she started coming out swinging to stop the genocide, and betrayed our good partner Israel. She probably would have lost the election even harder.

If the election was held on Lemmy? Sure, it would have been a winning move. Everyone Lemmy knows it’s a genocide. That’s not what the American people think. It would have gotten her a tiny handful of votes from activists and lost her a ton of support from the idiots.

If you think she should have done it anyway, I get that. If you want the Democrats to ditch this whole consultant-operated messaging machine and adopt Bernie Sanders’s authenticity instead, which probably would start winning them elections, I definitely get that. Like I said in a different comment, the problems go about a thousand miles deeper than “more town halls.” On that I think we can agree. But this whole fantasy-world where the election was hers for the taking if she’d only taken the side of the Palestinians is pure fantasy. Most people thought Trump would be better on the economy, and that’s why he won. The messaging which relentlessly connected Harris directly to the genocide in Gaza is only what they deploy against you, because it’ll resonate better with you than stuff about the price of eggs and how Biden caused inflation.