HaroldWilson
1yr ago
relevant
It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?
whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute
We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages. Which are currently rising.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
How is it different in this respect than just ordinary real wages?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
they are gamed for political purposes
In what manner? Please read this and tell me which specific elements of their methodology you question. Be specific.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Why would we want to adjust for that with ECI? Is workers retraining into better roles not part of an improving economy?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
"I'm fine at the moment, but the whole thing seems pretty shaky".
This is a ridiculous extrapolation to make beyond data which cannot be stretched that far. And the question's word was not 'fine' it was 'good'!
They look at pricing of the goods that they have the most exposure
Well good thing we don't need to operate on these general anecdotes and vibes, we can in fact look at statistics.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
It's like asking somebody about the weather when they're standing in the eye of a hurricane, it feels fine now but I'm not exactly celebrating yet.
The thing is though, if you ask people most say that they themselves are in the eye of the hurricane. At which point we have to ask how significant the hurricane really is.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
You understand this is literally the argument you yourself are making when you suggest we operate off anecdotes and not statistics.
between 50-100%
This number is simply wrong.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS
makes for over 25% inflation total
This is more accurate. However, two things to note. Firstly, your quarrel here is not with Joe Biden but American planning law. Secondly, I wonder what happens when we compare nominal wages to average nominal shelter prices - as you can see, they track together since Q1 2021, except for the past few quarters, in which admittedly shelter has outpaced wages. However, it's only one, admittedly large part of the basket, and this is urban rents which one imagines have risen faster than average. So all in all, not convinced.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAS2RS#0
you can expect to pay 2x or more your current mortgage on a comparable home
This number is an exaggeration, but aside from that look at this graph. The increase is clearly well underway pre-Biden. This has nothing to do with Bidenomics. Once again, if you want to blame someone blame NIMBYs.
Edit; just realised I put the wrong graph in and I've lost the right one. But the rent one proves enough I think. Unless this is a statement about interest rate increases, in which case ok but 'I think the government is running too contractionary a monetary policy' is sort of directly at odds with 'I think inflation is too high and it's the government's fault'.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
lived experience
Well it's good that you said the term for me, because any 'lived experience' argument would get short shrift here if someone tried to use it on literally any other issue. But because this is an opportunity to shit on Democrats/the left nobody feels the need to have falsifiable beliefs anymore.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
This doesn't really address the original arguments in the post. If this is the explanation, then why are ratings of 'am I personally doing well economically' high? The puzzling thing is the discrepancy, this explanation does not address.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
complaints are never addressed.
And a good thing too that they never will be, deflation is bad.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Look at your own damn graph! The precipitous fall in debt shown on the second graph comes in... 2008. Does this not perhaps tell us that taking rising debt as a measure of a bad economy is not a good idea?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Pretty much any measure of inflation is coming down at the moment, and is approaching normal levels. And most importantly, wages are rising even faster.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
("affordable" used cars aren't a thing anymore),
Not sure what you mean by affordable, but they very much are. Just go on the internet and you can find used cars in working order which do good MPG for pretty damn cheap. Sure, most of them might be on the older side and a bit scratched, but that's hardly that important.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
You may well be poorer than you were three years ago. Most people are not - incidentally, much, certainly more than normal, of the wage growth of the recent period has gone to lower income workers, which perhaps indicates why this discourse of a bad economy is tolerated despite the evidence to the contrary. Not sure what else to tell you is that, surprisingly, number continue to the best means of measuring things.
There is no way anyone on this forum would tolerate for a second this kind of 'lived experience' rhetoric if it was about, say, racism.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I've only read that Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman his whole life. I don't see that as a myth.
You could (with or without 'Southern' depending on the case) say that, no doubt, about a whole host of basically contemptible people. Between fighting a war to preserve slavery, and being a good chap, the latter struggles to be a minor footnote in his legacy.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave
This is what you would expect, no? There is no public interest from the journalist's perspective in further broadcasting the name - it would be grossly wrong of them to make any insinuation of deliberateness before there is any evidence of such, and if it is indeed just an accident, as I would imagine is overwhelmingly likely, then no point putting him in the story anyway - to be honest he's not even really a public figure. The only results on google for him except about the recent accident are some official league stats pages and a club bio. No more than you'd get for a decent amateur club cricketer. The number of Britons who know his name without knowing him personally would be a rounding error to 0, I imagine. In that light, putting his name in the national press under these circumstances seems unfair.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Sure, but the idea is that one particularly shocking event can be a useful springboard to discuss the wider policy issues that contributed not just to that incident but to many others like it. This happens across all sorts of issues.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Perhaps I'm biased being progressive myself, I think 'progressive influence' is really only obvious in culture-war adjacent topics; if you pick up a recent or semi-recent academic publication on history, even something charged like, say, civil rights/race/black history, the bias would be considerably less than it seems you imagine. If you avoid pop history/economics/whatever you'll be fine; I don't think they are broadly that partisan either, most of the time, but they're often bad anyway, and trendy culture war topics, you'd be fine. Who knows though, maybe I'm just so deep in progressive ideology I can't notice when it's there.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Heart disease, diabetes, urban violence?
Well guns are part of the urban violence, for one. In terms of other issues, maybe there are more important things (but consider what policy response you would propose for obesity etc. - are there any ones which would both have a shred of support and make a big difference)? However guns are certainly a sufficiently important problem to be worthy of some national debate. The West ought to talk about traffic deaths and heart disease more, but in America ideally at the expense of culture war fluff like trans issues rather than something genuinely important like guns.
And in fact, I support greater enforcement against people who carry unlicensed guns. Putting people who have illegal guns behind bars would greatly reduce gun violence,
True, but so would many conventional gun control measures like ERPOs, and indeed just reducing the overall ownership of guns. American should be doing all of these.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
This is not actually wrong/rude, especially coming from an American, but still unusual and the norm would be to answer it without answering the question and just giving another general greeting like 'morning' or whatever, or most commonly as someone else your own 'alright'?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Context and intonation always distinguish between the two, and I have never found myself wondering what was meant by the phrase in any particular situation.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
the statue necessarily glorifies the war itself
While a statue of Lee might not be glorifying him or the war, this particular one does seem like it is.
That seems very, very high, you can go online and find cars with fewer miles than that in reasonable working order for a quarter the price.
Which people do you suspect of manufacturing both of these things?
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