I would submit that a gerrymander by politicians saying fuck the voters and one by voters saying fuck the politicians are two wholly different animals

The issue isn't how the transaction is handled, it's the result - the more circular investment, the longer the non-profitability can last, the bigger the impact if it all goes down. Multiply x1000 across the sector and it's a systemic risk, starting with companies with cash flow issues like Oracle

This is why we need unions in tech. Employees should not be forced to train their replacements as a condition of employment

Hah! I like this one

#Tradle #1507 2/6
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tradle.net

The Federalist Society is (and has always been) designed to grow judicial power to eventually kneecap democratic accountability and let billionaires run the country for their own ends. It started as a multigenerational project, but Trump offered them a fascist shortcut

I'm telling y'all, Trump is taking Kharg Island. He thinks it's a trump card and he's not a dude who lets developing context get in the way of an idea he's had in his head for years. He's just waiting for his pieces to be in place. Until then he's just managing the markets

I am hearing that on his deathbed Pat McAfee received the light of Islam and unhesitatingly recited the Shahada. Even now he looks down on the Ummah from the gardens of Jannah. Truly there is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet!

It's political enshittification. He's doing to executive policy what Google did to search - do some A/B testing, figure out what's the most BS we can tolerate, then landing as close to that line as possible without going over

Right. Orban conceded because he lost the vote by more than a 2-to-1 margin. And that was *just barely enough* to remove his party from power!

Moving a country from a democratic order to a totalitarian one without a coup takes *decades*. Ask Putin. Fidez got most of the way but couldn't close

Because you get reminders of high price level every time you shop, and it's telling you a story about your purchasing power right now, but reminders of the unemployment rate only when you read a news report about it, and even in a bad slump it's likely not affecting you

I don't doubt that social media makes some people way more dour. But I have a hard time imagining that effect tanks consumer confidence by itself. Few people obsess over economics online! The idea that we use price level as a heuristic for economic health has more explanatory power IMO

This is my hunch. Price level is a natural heuristic for a healthy economy, and the only comparable change in price level is from four generations ago in a different economy. They had big unions with COLA contracts and different growth expectations, not surprising they could weather inflation better

Yup. Meanwhile most of the actual inflation was caused by a combo of shifting demand, supply shortages, and price gouging.

The narrative on inflation is hard to tame anyway, we use heuristics to gauge economic risk and high price levels make us nervous. It's easy to funnel that anger at the poor

A key question here is, what's causing the inflation? If the cause of inflation is *giving people money*, which leads eventually to higher prices, that's a better experience than an *exogenous shock* causing high prices. Of the 9% post-Covid inflation it was about 1/3 the former, 2/3 the latter

It's not a subsidy for capital exactly - if you're an investor with a portfolio designed to pay 8%, 8% inflation wipes out your real profit.

The issue is that capital is in a position to make workers and/or customers pay to offset any losses. And they'll blame progressive policy as they do it

Or, alternately, make the economy withstand inflation better. Give us Euro-style unions. Guarantee a living wage and adjust it for inflation. Give us Fed policy that places workers above bankers.

But just being like "inflation? whatever" is going to result in policy errors and lost elections

Nope. I just think if your policy is going to cause inflation it needs to have an immediate and lasting benefit that counteracts the effects of higher prices, which are going to be negative and linger longer than the inflation itself does. Don't give me a single check. Give me universal health care

Biden didn't deserve the blame, in other words. The core reason for the length and breadth of post-Covid inflation was that our institutions weren't prepared for an inflationary price shock. Contracts, supply chains, work arrangements were disrupted or broken, and that costs money and time to repair

Agreed. That said, the only policy he passed that could've actually contributed to inflation - the American Rescue Plan - would've done so by *giving people money* first. Which is morally and economically superior to *raising prices* first. And we're talking maybe 2% out of a 9% inflation rate.

I don't think they contributed much myself. The market didn't respond to extra cash in people's pocket with immediate price jumps of common consumer goods, instead inflation was all about shortages for a year-plus, then became generalized with 2nd/3rd order effects. So I think it's a separate topic

Inflation from an exogenous shock is different. We need to get, say, immediate free health care out of the deal. Otherwise people will get mad at the difference in price level, not the inflation rate, and that anger will last longer than the inflation, hurting the party in power for multiple cycles

Price stability was the de facto emphasis of the Fed ever since Alan Greenspan took the chair. In the 40 years since our whole economy reoriented around it as a basic fact. Supply chains, contracts, financialization, unionization, etc. A big inflation spike fucks us in ways it couldn't in the 70s

Jeez, I guess trashing a nuclear control agreement, launching an aggressive war when no imminent threat is at hand, then threatening genocide and demolition of civilian infrastructure when the other side doesn't immediately capitulate are all hunky dory under just war theory. My bad!

- The Pope

I think it's clear that mild inflation is unacceptable! We're not in the 1970s, when workers were just off a two decade run of rapidly rising wages and living standards, CoL was cheap, and COLAs protected unionized jobs from inflation. The post-Greenspan economy was built around price stability

He's just not serious about any of this.

It's not just the US and Iran with stakes here. It's Israel, the Saudis, the Gulf States. Vance does not negotiate for them. Also, Trump murdered the last Iranians who tried negotiation. Vance talks like there's an easy deal to be had and nooope

That said, debt dependence and rising CoL aren't the only issue. Trump/politics, AI job fears, post-pandemic/inflation PTSD are also making people more anxious. While social media makes that acutely worse in some cases, at their core those are genuine concerns. And that bleeds into sentiment metrics

I don't think debt-to-GDP is the best metric; debt anxiety is both how likely your situation turns south and how will you handle it. Pre-1980, cost were low, we handled it with savings. Now we use debt. Cheap debt reduced price discipline in housing, education, health care, and now debt isn't cheap

Mexico's gonna have to amp up their immigration patrols on the US border very very soon

That said, CSV is fundamentally a data table, and relational databases are really just data tables. An intro to MySQL course might also help.