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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • natarey@lemmy.worldtoJust Post@lemmy.worldNope. No.
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    6 months ago

    I’m sure. Enjoy your nuggies!

    Edit: Wow, you added so many big words! Did momma forget your sauce again?

    Hey, you’re an expert: do you think the uptick in the number of sticky-fingered midwesterners around here is a sign that Lemmy’s finally reaching a wider, less technical audience?




  • This is like an article declaring, “EU Investigates MySpace for causing child addiction and harm” – the people they’re trying to protect don’t use that product any more. The time to do this investigation was fifteen years ago, and the US government should have been the ones to do it.

    Don’t get me wrong – fuck Facebook. I hope they have to pay billions. But the people that company is harming now are adults and the elderly. I’m sure fifteen years from now, once all those people are dead, there’ll be an in-depth investigation and legislation about it.














  • This is, like… you don’t hear yourself, do you?

    Me: “People are miserable about the specific thing you’re pointing at to try dismiss discussion on this topic.”

    You: “That’s because discussions on this topic are a distraction from problems that I deem more important.”

    Me: “Okay, but you do realize that people don’t agree with your perception of the situation, or your prioritization of the problems, and that by insisting on this point in a pedantic way you come across as smug and dismissive.”

    You: “Yes, but what about my perception of what’s an actual problem?”

    You can shout from the rooftops that we have bigger fish to fry – and I might even agree with you – but people can’t even think about bigger problems as long as they’re struggling to pay the bills! People report having trouble paying the bills! Large swathes of the American public are drawing on their retirement savings to get by! Whether you think the inflation situation and its aftermath is an “actual problem”, telling people they’re wrong and throwing numbers at them is just not going to be an effective strategy here.


  • And I’m telling you that your approach to doing this is, rhetorically, disastrous. You come across as both smug and dismissive of people’s suffering and anxiety – and your response to reading me say that musn’t be, “Well, this person is irrational and not willing to engage with data.”

    Yes, people are dissatisfied with basically… all of how modern nation states are organized and run, from government to business to day-to-day social interactions.

    But the whole premise of democracy is that the people, in aggregate, know best how to direct our lives. And what poll after poll says is, people are frustrated in particular with the perceived decline in their purchasing power. That perceived decline comes directly from making more money and yet only being able to afford the life they had before the round of inflation started. The very “wage growth” that you are claiming has mooted the issue of inflation.

    So, even if it’s true that, on average, people’s spending power is the same now as it was before the pandemic – which may not be true, depending on whether the already wealthy, to whom most of the gains have gone since the pandemic, are skewing that average – that is not a victory. It is, at best, a depressing reminder that people live in a system that cares more about aggregate statistics on a balance sheet than it does about their actual lives.


  • That you don’t seem to get what we’re saying is amazing. What you are talking about does not matter to most people – their own lived experience of not being able to afford basic necessities, or having to draw on savings and retirement income to afford them, are all they see. You can shout numbers at people all you like, but all they – and I – hear is, “Your own lived experience is wrong, and I know better than you do about your day to day life.”

    So, let’s grant for argument’s sake that the numbers you’re citing actually say what you imply – that wage increases have made up for inflation for most people, and therefore no one has any reason to complain. You do realize that desperately job hopping to try to stay where you started economically is enervating and miserable, right? To spend three years post-pandemic finding new work, retraining, striking, and all the rest, only to find yourself economically no better off than when you started? What a nightmare.

    I get that you have a pile of numbers that say everything’s rosy – but most regular people appear to disagree with you, judging by consumer sentiment polls and other surveys. The answer in that case isn’t to double down and declare that people are too stupid to know whether they’re doing okay financially – the answer is to ask yourself whether your measures are wrong, or your data isn’t capturing something critical.


  • I mean, this article from from AP is what we’re all talking about:

    But even as overall price increases slow, it doesn’t mean inflation is reversing or that most prices are falling back to pre-pandemic levels. The consumer price index, the most widely followed measure of inflation, remains about 20% higher than it was before the pandemic.

    Milk prices, which have ticked down compared with the past year, are still 23% higher than they were pre-pandemic. Ground beef prices are 31% higher. Gas prices, despite a steep decline from a year ago, are still 46% higher than before the pandemic.

    Many economists say a key reason why so many Americans hold a gloomy view of the economy despite very low unemployment and steady hiring is that these prices — on items that they buy regularly — remain much higher than they were three years ago.

    https://apnews.com/article/inflation-prices-interest-rates-economy-federal-reserve-1f83d45fc6e30c6864d1b02913ec60c6

    Basically, the things that actually matter to most people – food, fuel, housing, utilities – remain more expensive than before the pandemic by significant margins. And those prices will never come back down. The best most can hope for is to earn more money to offset the price hike – which, for most people, means taking on new or additional employment just to be able to get back to where they were before the pandemic. People have lost ground. That’s the problem here.