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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26875 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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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.

We would probably still have President Biden. If he hadn’t been sinking in the polls in May, he never would have done the debate and could have campaigned from the basement as in 2020. The unpopularity of his policies and poor economy forced him to play his hand, which turned out to be a pair of senile 4s.

That line where she couldn't name anything different was absolutely killer. However, didn't happen in a vacuum! I called that specific aspect back in ~August when she missed the window to roll out an actual set of policies, especially important given that a second debate did not happen... she filled the void of news with a grand total of one singular policy (at-home medicare).

Interestingly enough, guess who she actually performed pretty well with? Yep, the 65+ crowd. The data's not strong enough to draw a straight line but it's still suggestive. Personality matters. Policies matter. Money only provides a nudge, it can't replace these two aspects.

Yep, the 65+ crowd.

Harris was, ironically, the more conservative pick of the two. 65+ made out like absolute bandits through Blue team's response to the uncommon cold; they have the most investments, generally own their homes, and have a more negative impression of factions that can't claim the moral high ground.

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”?

Amazon is not the same tier as Meta and Google. Engineer comp at Amazon is about half of what it is at Meta or Google. We reject a whole lot of applicants coming from Amazon.

C players drag down A players in lots of ways. The most obvious is making messes for the A players to clean up. Less obvious is trying to justify their existence through things like diversity initiatives and such that cause everyone to have to deal with linguistic purges and trainings and such. They also just take far longer to explain things to, and they’ll bog you down with questions they ought to be able to answer for themselves if they were smarter or more conscientious.

I doubt you'd be able to find any signal like that, because inflation affects everyone similarly.

It really doesn't in this case. Inflation was very heavily tied to a handful of goods, particularly housing and briefly transportation along with services, while barely touching other goods like consumer electronics or clothing. And wage increases were very concentrated in a handful of jobs, rather than being spread evenly, with union jobs seeing 50% pay increases and non-union government jobs going unfilled or poorly filled because the salaries became uncompetitive.

Someone who worked in a field where pay scaled with inflation quickly, and who owned a house and car which they still own, did pretty well, even if groceries or McDonald's got more expensive. Someone in a similar social class who happened to work as an admin in a government department and needed to buy a house and a car in the last four years, got fucked.

I somewhat doubt that most voters are looking at objective metrics of inflation rather than “how am I doing financially”. The inflation theory also doesn’t hold true across demographics, I don’t think? Why would elderly women, a demographic which is keenly aware of shifting prices at stores, shift even further toward Kamala? But a “social media environment” can explain this shift, because they aren’t on the new environments but stuck in the old news cycle + newspaper environment.

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