Will Stancil with another banger: https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1730723754223800617
Last year the bread price went from 2.50 a loaf to 2.75. This year the price of bread ONLY rose from 2.75 to 2.90. See? Things are getting better!
:can't-remember-name-of-arm-right:
:can't-remember-name-of-arm-left:"ITS KONQUESTING TIME!"
rate of inflation
Weasel question. If the inflation rate was 15% last year and then “only” 13%, then technically the rate of inflation has gone down up obviously you still have the issue of higher prices than last year.
rate of inflation
As @sovietknuckles@hexbear.net said a few days ago:
When your data doesn't confirm the point you want to make, just add more derivatives
"According to our expert analysis, wage growth actually outpaced inflation from 2:36:03 AM to 2:36:07 AM on the 14/11/2023, therefore you should all quit complaining about inflation, it's actually fine, don't worry about it."
cannot wait for bourgeois economists to discuss the jerk, snap, crackle, and pop of inflation
Yeah I’m not gonna be happy until I see negative inflation. Deflation.
As somebody with debt and no sabings, inflation is ok by me IF my wages go up by the same amount, it actually benefits me by decreasing the amount of debt I owe.
My mistake, I thought everything costs more and rent has fucking tripled since covid. I guess I'm actually not poor despite my lack of money
Did you read the basket of goods they use? It includes a tv ffs. Apparently tv prices matter to people who have to choose which meal they skip.
The wall is too kind for these stains upon humanity
Tv did take a huge dip in price (completely unrelated to the fact the majority of people were watching content on their phones or computer screens I'm sure) so literally every article uses them, the one thing that's decreased in price, as a comparison point to show stuff isn't getting more expensive.
The main reason TVs have dropped in price is because under surveillance capitalism the TV watches you. On a lot of models more money is made from all of the spyware and adtech that comes with TV than from the sale of the TV itself.
Interactive TV sets will be watching us, just as we watch them. They will also report back to the beast at computer headquarters. Our telephone conversations will be automatically wire tapped and transcripted by the National Security Agency
Killah Priest "information", from Heavy Mental, 1998
🎶 You think you've private lives Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape I'm watching all the time 🎶
This explains why it's virtually impossible to buy a "dumb" TV anymore.
Have you checked your bank account for a recent inheritance from your dear aunt sally?
The fact that I have a very very rich great aunt who never spent a dime on herself (her husband who died before I was born, so must have been when she was in her 40s or so was like one of the earliest investors in AT&T and obviously that paid off big.) is pretty much what's keeping me able to not be homeless. So...yeah, that is essentially the case.
Real average hourly earnings increased 0.8 percent, seasonally adjusted, from October 2022 to October 2023. The change in real average hourly earnings combined with a decrease of 0.9 percent in the average workweek resulted in no change in real average weekly earnings over this period.
Now ask them to adjust for housing costs, which they more or less never do.
They almost never include necessities in these calculations. To them the real measure of economic activity is the price of 65" TVs dropping 10%, not rent going up 100% or housing prices going up 200-300%, or food prices going up 60%.
Hey, you can get a smart TV for 85% the adjusted price of one last year and wages have gone up .8% on average meaning you can open another tv! Why are you complaining?
Idk about you but new TVs is a primary monthly expense for me. I have like 6 in my bathroom alone.
I have 8 in the room I'm in right now.
I bought one of them from a store, the rest are second-hand, 2 are over 20 years old.
IDK why anyone would use a consumer good that people buy on average like once a decade. Might as well include mattress and car prices in there.
Do NOT defile my FLAG with a damn MOON!
🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷 🇱🇷
Gotta have Tucker Carlson shouting about communism at you from all angles, natural laxative
to their mind rent going up is an increase in income not costs
Yeah, because they are housing prices going up as solidifying their position in the owning class
This is what these policy wonk nerds do they mire you down in the little details, "um, SIR, ACTUALLY you got 0.8cents of a raise, adjusted for inflation in QE 3 of 2024, ipso facto things are better than 30 years go
"That's even without jumping into quintiles. If two quintiles got shit on, and two got the bombenomics bonus, you'll have your half of population mad. Not that ft cares
The weasel wording of "rate of hourly earnings" and not "net income per paycheck".
If your hourly wages increase but the number of hours you work is less than it was before, then your income has effectively been cut.
I should have made clear this is bls data, i don't know what ft is citing outside of vibes
hey nerd, break question 1 down into income quartiles for me.
oh, look at that - the other 4 questions have immediately been explained by the rate of wage increase per income quartile? wow
fuck, i went to the replies and Aimee fucking Therese made this exact point.
Time traveler from 1800: "Wow! What was the 21st century like?"
Me: "I got gaslit by a fucking magazine"
In the 1800s news media was firmly owned by the merchants who regularly gaslit the entire population.
Exactly! The article OP posted is from a Financial Times, an outlet that has been publishing this kind of shit since 1888.
Show
Both Marx and later Lenin were dunking on the very same print media outlets still active today. We still meme about Lenin talking shit on the Economist, which today is publishing the same shit they did back in 1843.
Show
Fkn Marx was a newspaper columnist in New York for a few years. The New York Times is publishing the exact same shit-lib editorials and opinion peices today as it did in 1851. If you want a wild evening of reading, I suggest digging through their archives for coverage of the abolitionist movement and slavery around the time the US civil war was kicking off.
Show
“Do you think the rate of inflation has risen or stayed the same since this time last year.”
People are correctly pointing out that inflation has made prices worse. The fact that the rate is down is little consolation when the rate has been very high and is still higher than for their salaries.
Translated into reality:
The economy is so bad we don’t even base our measurements of it on the assumption that it’s stable.
Someone posted an inflation graph on here the other day that showed the huuuuuuuge spike a year ago and the not-even-close-to-comparable dip that's happened since then. That question is absolutely a cherry picked piece of data.
I personally think that requiring ordinary people to understand differential calculus to parse the question is cool and normal.
Fortunately they don’t need calculus to recognize the state’s BS in this case
It’s the equivalent of raising the prices by 10% before having a “blow out sale” of 5%
More like raising prices 15% and then acting like it's a sale to only raise them an additional 4%
There's now like 2-5 Op-Eds/Twitter threads a week about how the economy is ASKCUALLY doing GREAT now, and every one gets posted to r/neoliberal
The funniest part is no one wants to talk about why roughly 10% to 15% say there is no inflation, they are wealthier than ever, and life is great but the other 90% of the US is screaming that they are living on the edge closer to homelessness and ruin than ever before. Sometimes these same articles will mention that luxury car sales are at an all time high as further evidence that the 90% are just being delusional.
Which socioeconomic class do your think the authors of all these articles and posts fall into, the 90% or 10%? Same people always try to point out to fellow Americans that by being in the US a person is automatically in the global top 10%, which is an insidious lie. It's eye opening for most Americans when they learn only the top 15% of US households fall into the global top 10%, that most Americans don't take home the required $150,000 USD or greater but a few tens of thousand each year and are indebted with zero savings. The sheer number of US adults who only manage to earn roughly $20,000 USD per year is hard for these people to wrap their minds around.
The US government only tracking "household income" rather than a break down of incomes for individual working aged US adults is also a slight of hand. An unspecified number of individual people living under one roof with multiple incomes being combined to get that household income number, further skewed by millions of functionally homeless (couch surfing, living in cars, living in motels a few days a week) working adults most of which are lower income being just ignored.
It makes me wonder who this stuff is actually for, are they trying to convince the vast majority of people? Or are they just trying to reinforce their own safe little bubble?
i think they are trying to convince atomized poor people that they are delusional or their problems are purely their own, an anomaly, and completely their fault.
gaslight gaslight gaslight. better rise and grind because everyone else is making bank. inflation? ha that's just because you need a third job dummy nobody wants to work anymore
I dont think think a lot of it is conscious. Lots if these people are professional class libs for whom data is more real than the world outside their door. So for them if the data says things are fine then it must be fine. Everyone else is mistaken because they arent "smart," read "educated," read "gone to the right finishing schools," to understand it. But they never ask why the data says what it says or how it could be wrong. It's a unique kind if modern idealism.
"Here's why what you're experiencing is not actually real."
-Some Chucklefuck
TBF, people "experience" things that aren't going on all the time.
Half of Republicans think they live under a Trans-Muslim Communist dictatorship, for example.
don't worry we will soon be sitting on our thrones ordering the cis masses marched to the transing chambers
because that's a community that was imagined for them by what they consume. Watching shit through the TV is not experiencing anything
This is the same argument Libs are using to dismiss people's economic woes. It's all just social media feeding them bad vibes, the stats say people are actually doing great!
ur right listening to fox news and cnn talk about pan-muslamic trans-jihadi terrorism is the same as my landlord saying the rent will increase when my lease renews
Don't mistake me for making this argument myself, I'm just saying it's their counter-argument.
If you come at them with this line they'll just say it's an anecdote, better to point out the blind spots in the data, like for example that housing is objectively way more expensive across the board with little sign of getting better anytime soon, so even if people are doing a bit better otherwise most of that improvement is being eaten up by housing costs.
Fish hook theory is proved correct once again. Libs and Conservatives are both fully on board with the "facts don't care about your feelings" method of argument and don't seem to understand that being smarmy to people who are miserable doesn't get them to like you.
And then they follow their feelings and twist the facts to suit them
These freaks are going to fuck up their game and bag by denying Americans their bread and circus
That's the ultimate irony of these fucksticks.
People like the Koch brother (half way there) and all the other far right pieces of dogshit spent decades astroturfing and fueling this anti-government sentiment. Selling the idea that government is hated by everyone, government is inefficient and ineffective so private corporations are the better alternative. That allowing wealth to accumulate in only a few individuals will benefit everyone as they fund humanitarian projects.
One thing I gotta hand to guys like Rockefeller is he took his son's advice and actually did give a fuck load of money to prop up stuff that benefited society. This isn't praise for him, no, it's just recognizing that he wasn't a total buffoon. He and his son and family (and many other tycoons then and since then) realized you either have to give back or eventually things will degrade so far that people snap and TAKE back what you stole.
Unfortunately the Koch-types let their wild dogs off the leash and they have no power to control them anymore. Things like repealing Roe v Wade was supposed to be the carrot forever in front of the hogs so that they accept the tax cuts for the wealthy. Cutting social security was always supposed to be promised in the pursuit of "cutting taxes" and making the damn disabled and elderly (obviously they're all faking it) go back to work. The non-dipshits knew that passing such unpopular laws not only would end the game for them it would also cause societal ruptures that they couldn't undo. You can't shove the country ever further to the right for a century and then when the inevitable comes to pass, and the boom post-WWII completely fades, start screaming "woah woah too far guys! We gotta keep THAT law!"
There are people, a lot of them, who somewhat-correctly identify government programs as failing to meet their proposed goal. Social security disability is one. Medicaid, various unemployment programs, food stamps/EBT, etc. They fail to see that the reasons those programs fail is due to systematic dismantling and crippling via defunding, understaffing, and means testing. Neoliberalism, basically. The idea that the "market" can and will solve all problems, so why do we need social security? Mix that in with radicalization of (ironically) many poor workers to knee jerk question and resent anyone who does become old enough or disabled enough to break through all the means testing and red tape to get benefits and, of course, racism, and it's a perfect recipe for advocating against their own best interests and for, no exaggeration, ultimately the total dismantling of the federal government followed by state governments (which are already inadequate).
This is something the "tea party" (idiotic name) types and their outgrowth which includes people like pdf file Gaetz, Gym Jordan, etc. openly advocated for for like 20 years now. At least 15 years. To shut government down (brother!) to defund every "unnecessary" agency (guess which are unnecessary? Hint: it sure isn't the military or FBI), and basically to grind everything to a halt.
A ridiculous idea, one that the Koch brother (never gets old) surely is not thrilled about seeing actually possibly happening. Because all he really wanted (his personal views on abortion, gay marriage, God, etc. are totally irrelevant) was to keep his taxes down and make sure he and his family and his capitalist buds could make billions of dollars and continue directing how Washington is run. If there is no government, or society starts SERIOUSLY declining (imagine the homelessness if social security were cut by say 50%), their wealth starts becoming pointless. Riots are inevitable if enough people are homeless and hungry. That's why they've always favored the "bread and circus" route instead of the full on authoritarian "pick up that can, citizen!" approach. It's more peaceful (in their home country - key point), safer, more enjoyable. If they can't go to the airport anymore without a person chucking his shit at their limo before he's blown away by private police in front of them, that's not so much fun anymore!
I don't know how they can recover things. If I were a betting person, I'd say they can't recover neoliberalism. It's going away one way or another. The only thing left to see is how right wing authoritarian things get, how bad things get, at least in the US. Other places may well have strong leftist movements rise up. The US, due to 80 strong years but over a century generally, of anti-socialism and anti-communism rhetoric is surely going down the fash pipeline. Probably anyway.
The big difference between now and rockafellars day was that their was actual competition amongst the elite.
Now they are all on the same page. Have crushed competition and having done that have allowed their ranks to be filled with buffon fail sons that can't plan more than the next quarter out.
elderly (obviously they're all faking it)
always knew those dastardly elderly were faking age. Don't get me started on all these workshy "dead" people
Mix that in with radicalization of (ironically) many poor workers to knee jerk question and resent anyone who does become old enough or disabled enough to break through all the means testing and red tape to get benefits and, of course, racism, and it's a perfect recipe for advocating against their own best interests
once knew a guy who would say "I've broken every bone in my body who needs health and safety" he really was a fucking moron
on the general point
I agree about the problem but they might be true believers and just not realise the problem they are creating. It's entirely possible that they don't understand that these issues will happen because they don't actually think about what happens to poor people
Yeah, that's true. Some people might actually be deluded enough (Peter Thiel fuck his name not googling it types) to believe in some sort of anrchocapitalism hellscape. Into which they'd instantly become enslaved by some massive Bezos Amazon slave factory (chattel slavery instead of the slavery of forced to sell labor for a wage). But I guess good luck explaining that to them... many seem to have the imagination of a 14 year old. They're definitely not all stupid, just extremely naive and uneducated if they think a world with zero federal government will in any tangible way be better than this one. I know a lot of people want or joke about "going back to monkey" or back to feudalism style arrangements. That's definitely not their plan though. They want something more like a Mad Max style future but they think they'll be the robot guy in charge of water (spoiler: they won't be).
They want something more like a Mad Max style future but they think they'll be the robot guy in charge of water
I don't think this is it again I just don't think they understand that this will happen
It's entirely possible that they don't understand that these issues will happen because they don't actually think about what happens to poor people
or they like what happens to poor people
Guns very cheap. Bulk ammo is relatively cheap. Meanwhile basic needs keep rising with no end in sight. Sounds like a good combination for a country that never has homicidal maniacs shooting up public places due to misplaced rage.
Hilarious tbh. The audacity to publish a poll where you shit talk one segment of the population, not to mention 90%
Stancil as great, I hope he never gives this up. Like its been explained to him dozens of times every day for three years now that peoples experience of the economy really can't be captured in macroeconomic data and ultimately it's people's lived experience that will drive voting in 2024. And yet every day he logs on with a new GDP chart and screams at people that their should change their opinion on the economy becuase of the chart.
Also the only people that follow him and engage with him are leftists who are there to make fun of him.
oh, it's that clown getting roasted for making excuses to avoid reading and engaging with theory
https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/crank-profiles-3-will-stancils-theory
fridge: "ad blockers are not allowed on youtube: content blocked"
"Your Fridge is incompatible with YouTube, update your Fridge's software to continue watching YouTube on your Fridge."
tries to update Fridge's software
"We sorry, but your Fridge is no longer receiving upgrade support."
bread prices huh?
