psychothumbs

The Only Guardrail Left Is Us

Can anyone really be so dumb as to see people who Trump himself appointed to office and worked closely with saying "this guy is an evil wannabe dictator" and think "man, those guys are part of the deep state conspiracy to destroy Trump"?

Yes, but they don’t even mention the yearly target in the article, just broadly allude to inflation not being an issue anymore, even though it has actively driven prices up significantly for pretty much everything for the last few years. It is absolutely a pain point that is often glossed over when talking about the economy, usually when commenting how good it is.

I'm not sure what to make of this complaint. Yes the article assumes some basic level of understanding of what these terms mean. We had a bout of inflation, meaning prices rose quickly, and then it ended and prices are back to their usual flat or slow increase rate of change.

As for the job market, I’m in tech. It’s insanely hard to get a job right now, as most places simply aren’t hiring (or worse, put up job ads but have no plan to fill them, as insane as that is). Wages have stagnated for sure, and housing has gone up in price. I haven’t actually seen many high wage growth for a lot of stuff around me either, mostly just adjusting lower end wages so that people can (mostly) afford rent. 2% inflation is better than the last couple of years, but the article linked completely downplayed all of those factors. Which is why I said it was bullshit.

Ah well there's your issue right there - tech in particular is not doing so hot right now, but most other parts of the economy are doing great. Got to look at the data on the big picture and not just what you see in your own little niche.

Wow that is outrageous. Hopefully there are still sideloading ereaders on the market by the time my current one dies, I don't want to have to go search for one on ebay.

Huh? Yes 2% is the usual inflation target, so getting it down to that level constitutes defeating inflation. We wouldn't really want it to go any lower, much less so low that it turns into the deflation it would take to reverse the price increases of the high inflation era as you seem to be arguing for.

Not sure what you're getting at with the job market either - we have low unemployment and high wage growth, that's about as good as job markets get.

That somewhat unnecessary influx of money is what allowed prices to jump, but it’s also interesting that our rate of inflation was persistently lower than many other developed nations, so it may not have been totally unnecessary.

Isn't America's low inflation relative to countries that intervened less the proof that the influx of money was not that cause of inflation? Not so much that spending the extra money actively reduced inflation, but it just turned out to not be a major factor. Meanwhile the extra spending was hugely important for keeping the American economy growing, while underspending held back many other countries.

Because rich Republicans also own the media.

Yeah it really makes Mastodon unusable as the "one big forum" that twitter was and bluesky is trying to be.

I mean, Mastodon is a joke if that's what you're asking

Bluesky is just a lot better. I have no particular commitment to the ActivityPub protocol.

Sadly Mozilla is not immune to following the dumb fads that run through Silicon Valley, but Firefox is still clearly the best browser option.

I'm not sure I understand how deepfake porn is supposed to be ruining lives here. From the article it seems like the issue is not any concern that it would be mistaken for real, but instead just people having a very horrified reaction to seeing that sort of depiction of themselves? Mostly it seems like the deepfake aspect is sort of a trivial distraction to the real issue on display there of gangs of men targeting random women for online harassment. If there was no such thing as deepfakes other sexually explicit or disturbing images could sub in easily enough.

Maybe the new deepfake ban will be useful as a way of going after these harassment gangs that previously didn't face legal consequences? But it's sort of an inexact tool for that job, given that there are presumably lots of deepfake images out there not used for harassment, and that's it's easy enough for harassers to switch away from deepfakes if using them becomes a major legal vulnerability.