What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%! Whatever it is the voices you hear are a tiny slither of the population skewed to the most disagreeable and combative end of the personality spectrum. So, unless you’ve done some world class polling to determine the answer to that then I’d suggest gaining more perspective.
The number was clearly just rhetoric. The point is that a very large number of people view data like this as "good news" for their team. So rather than have reasonable discussions about e.g. why this is likely just an echo of the covid response/recovery combined with geopolitical disruption to supply chains... we have a bunch of doomsayers in every thread yelling about how this is clearly not transient and how we're entering a new era of stagflation, etc... It's just tiresome.
Let me ask this: what would convince you?
Continued inflation. But absent that I'm going to stick with the obvious hypothesis that the external forcing from slightly overgenerous pandemic relief, late-pandemic shutdown of Shanghai and most of Chinese output for two months, (edit: also automotive/heavy industry production shortfalls due to "chip shortage") and the removal of one of the biggest petroleum and gas exporters from the world market did what you'd expect those things to do. You can go farther and look at what sectors are seeing inflation and what aren't and see more evidence for this, FWIW.
But yeah, if we come back in another 18 months and are still at 8% YoY inflation, then that hypothesis will have been wrong. Wanna take that bet?
> If [St. Louis Federal Reserve President James] Bullard has his way, the rate will continue rising to a range of 3.75%-4% by the end of the year. After starting 2022 near zero, the rate has now come up to a range of 2.25%-2.5%.[1]
While at the same time, fiscal policy is tightening. The "slightly" overgenerous Covid aid is over and the President is likely to get only a fraction of his $3.5 trillion dollar dream program.
And eventually OPEC will probably increase oil production, as Biden asked them to [2]; or Biden will change his stance on increasing US production. (BTW, Russia hasn't been removed from the market. Their exports have only fallen about 15% since the invasion [3], which is easily compensated for. The fact that producers haven't increased production has a lot to do with Biden.)
But a return to sound fiscal policy and practical oil policy won't reverse the damage of two years of inflation and slow or negative growth.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/03/feds-bullard-sees-more-inter...
2: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/03/energy/joe-biden-saudi-trip-o...
3: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russian-O...
So... you agree it's transitory? Why jump in to argue the opposite then? This sounds a little like a strawman, where you pretend that the "other side" meant "transitory" in the sense of weeks instead of a year or two. And no one did.
> won't reverse the damage of two years of inflation
And this is a misconception. Inflation isn't "damage", it's just a change in units. By definition (!), inflation numbers represent no change in total value of assets as a percent of macro numbers like GDP.[1] Your argument seems like it's deliberately trying to conflate the idea of inflation with "recession", when that's simply not correct.
[1] It's true that there is some disruption and relative movement of assets, though. If you're a bank who's written a bunch of dollar-denominated loans, inflation is very bad for you. If you're a credit card user carrying a balance, it's good. On the whole inflation represents a net transfer of wealth from loaners to borrowers, and in the modern US that's actually not entirely a bad thing.
No, transitory implies that it would go away on its own, without action by the government. I think it's going to end because the policies that I think caused it have ended. If the policies that were in place when it was first called transitory were still in place, then I would take the bet.
> Inflation isn't "damage"
I was referring to the decline in real wages, sky high house prices pricing out the working class, things like that. Not inflation per se.
inb4 someone calls the journalist or researcher or whatever a partisan shill/troll/hack.
Feel that reflex? We’re pretty good about not acting on it here, but this is a fairly special place.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/25/alarming-...
The medium is the message. Everybody should read McLuhan if they work in the technology space. [0]
Most people don't give a shit about it. Assuming the rest does is heavy projection.
Yes, but the parent's point might still hold.
You might not watch something because you hate the thing they put in (and that could be a minority), but you might not watch something also because "you don't give a shit" about the thing they put in - and want more of what you do like.
I think the Ghostbusters remake is an example where people not hating woke ideologically, still dislike the movie, because they don't give a shit about the things the writers found so important...
There is a lot of good rather feminist TV shows who don't get touted as feminist (mostly YA and fantasy tbh). The one who tries to sold themselves on that though, are all bad.
But i think this is transitory. In the 60s, when "La nouvelle vague" started to include different, new stereotypes (of women mostly, but of men too), there wasn't a lot of really good success in the beginning (to my eyes at least, the stereotypes were too much). They also had less money and couldn't afford to go wrong that many time, and eventually Truffaut got it right imho. Hollywood il bust, probably a lot, lot more than La nouvelle vague, but will start to get it right. Hopefully.
In fact I know plenty of "woke" people who also think that it sucks. Some maybe semi-secretly.
The film has plenty to be criticised.
Whereas they don't have any issue with a strong, feminist female lead like Ripley (were men are usually the laughing stock, and all die in the hands of the xenomorph due to incompetence).
Your point is that "stuff <10% of people will like" doesn't make up for a mediocre film, and studios are trying to capitalise on that rather than working on better stories.
If so, I definitely agree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines in other places too. That's seriously not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so often that we've banned the account. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32351713.
Source?
> That misperception has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value, adding up just Disney, Warner, and Netflix.
How so? Do any of those companies have competitors who didn't "go woke," and are now profiting off their missteps? Those companies may have lost a ton of value, but I don't think it's because of that cause.
> Democrat politicians seem to have similarly misperceived — and now are facing widespread public backlash to their policy.
But that may not matter. They're also cultivating a backlash against Republicans, hoping that will counter any backlash against them. IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't even try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their respective activist bases.
This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
I'd say this has a deeper root cause - first past the post voting. Since merging your votes is a winning strategy, it just naturally tends towards a two party system. And once you have only two serious contenders on the ballot, you have to choose them somehow... And having that decided by a central committee, of which you have two, sounds like an even more slippery slope than primaries.
The most annoying bit is the two parties. You either religiously belong to a blue tribe or a red tribe, or you're resigned to picking which of your values to sacrifice to have representation aligned with the others.
STV seems to make things much better. Look at the current composition of Dáil Éireann - three large parties capturing a bit above 20% seats each, then almost as many independents, then a bunch of smaller parties. And every voter can truthfully say that their vote contributed to the elected candidate they liked most, not against a candidate they hated.
The problem with the primary system is that it imposes significant guardrails upon intellectual debate, by making the partisans who coddle large vocal minorities appear to be the furthest you can go while still being successful. In fact, we have needed to think well outside even those boxes for many decades.
We need the citizenry to hold more radical political views. Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts, things which today very few people with a voice actually have. I don't care if you want to be a communist, a libertarian, or even a fascist authoritarian. As long as we stop having dull, ridiculous conversations comfortably within the tiny ring of globalist technocracy. That is what's literally killing the civilized world.
It can. Or it can indicate a very distorted understanding, based on badly flawed assumptions. Within that distorted worldview, the most bizarre proposals can seem perfectly reasonable, even "scientific".
There are radicals of several different flavors. They can't all have a (working) understanding of political concepts.
They’re literally setting records.
You can also compare within a single studio, such as Prime Video: why did Reacher and Terminal List succeed where Wheel of Time and Rings of Power did not?
Edit:
> IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't event try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their activist bases.
I agree.
So far, Rings of Power has pulled in Infinity dollars per episode. Probably won't stay that way, but that seems pretty successful to me.
Who gives a shit about useless thieves with no ability to actually produce or do anything worthwhile??! Fuck the 'shareholders value'. We need to do more for and pay the PEOPLE better, who get things done. Ya know, the actual workers. All that a 'shareholder' does is extract money/value from other peoples hard work.
Disney lost value because it's mismanaged by a horrible CEO, and hasn't produced anything meaningful outside of Marvel and Star Wars since forever. Add to that a struggling parks business in general, combined with epic mismanagement around "maybe we should just target people who want $5K hotel rooms and $2K drinks", and... here we are.
Netflix, similarly, suffers from self-inflicted wounds. Their struggling attempts to monetize account sharing are a much too late financial attempt to paper over the fact that their auth system is... not so good. Mildly put. Their content content has taken a deep turn towards "reality" schlock after they so brilliantly ousted Cindy Holland (who was responsible for bringing good content) while elevating Bela Bajaria (the king of garbage shows). Those shows play well on social media, but they do shit all for the bottom line.
It's not "went woke", it's "leaned into incompetence".
The same holds true on the political side. A large chunk of the recession rests firmly on politicians who completely and utterly fucked up the handling of the pandemic. Republicans and Democrats both. Different flavors of incompetence, but... it was a shit show either way.
AKA only the most profitable franchises of all time…
For two, even if it were consistently down over five years - what bearing has this on the discussion?
Even if each Marvel movie had yields like Dr. Strange - it's not enough to justify a $200B market cap. Disney has a P/E of 74 right now. That'd be on extremely high end for pure tech plays during the tech boom heydays, and it's completely unsustainable for a media company.
Reminder, Netflix, which is also considered "in trouble" has a P/E of 20.
You cannot sustain on the backs of those two alone. (But also: Given that they're the most profitable franchises of all time, maybe the woke scolding is misplaced. Clearly, people still love the fare. There just isn't enough)
> What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%!
I think what he probably meant was 30% at any given time, and in my rough estimation, he actually might be right. It's the difference between feeling that way, and being loud about it on Twitter.
I mean, can you imagine a committed liberal wanting the country to do better under a conservative politician with conservative policies? No, of course not, they want liberal policies. So they want the conservative to fail, and the country to do worse as a result, so the electorate will be unhappy and vote for a liberal next time. Then they can get their preferred liberal policies.
Too many news media outlets start their daily reporting from "what's trending on twitter", not appreciating the degree to which those trends are being pushed by malicious parties (both foreign and domestic), and in no way represent the real dialogue Americans are having.
The FBI has published numerous reports on explicit online influence campaigns carried out by foreign organizations attempting to polarize US domestic online dialogues. ...and they do this be radicalizing the conversations on both sides.
No, it's not a pandemic. No, it's not a recession.
But can't we do better here on HN, and discuss the state of the economy without petty partisan arguments?
Gas goes down to $2 a gallon. You probably pay less to commute to work or pull your boat. But your kids (and these days, you) might face crippling droughts and heat waves as an indirect consequence. Is that "better"?
I can understand differing views.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadli...
If your house were on fire, you would want the public authorities to acknowledge the fact. This is not rooting for the fire
The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.
And real wages fell 3% in six months [1] (i.e. over the first half of this year, wages fell at a 6% annual rate), so I think it's time to acknowledge that the nation is doing worse, at least for the working class.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216259/monthly-real-aver...
If so, I blame the media for constantly selling their narratives and inciting hatred. Any disagreement is labeled as far this and far that. If a politician makes a move that does not fit a side's narrative, the media will attack the politician's motives and assume the worst. When the SCOTUS make a ruling that the media disagrees with, it must be that the SCOTUS are the worst human beings in the world and they have the most sinister motives. The list can go on.
I'd also blame the education system of the US. We are supposed to educate kids to take different views, to seek information instead of merely opinions, to be aware of logical fallacies, especially the damaging ones like attacking one's motive. Yet someone we get generations of angrier and angrier kids.
The politicians and the media (i.e., the 10%) continue to live in a bubble. They have a very biased and incestuous lens. It's groupthink taken to an extreme.
Just look at the news yesterday. Pelosi crossed a line in the sand and visits Taiwan. Given all the other things on our collective plate, how was adding more to that pile (of sh*t?) a good use of her time and energy? And taxpayer resources? Who in the 90% wants more on the pile? And who in the 10% is willing to say, "Nancy! You're only showing how out of touch you are with the 90%."
I'm not suggesting Taiwan be cut loose. Not at all. Only that the sense of priorities is dumbfounding. But perhaps, rather than talk about the economy (and the 90%'s perceptions and fears) it makes better political and media sense to have news of Nancy in Taiwan?
Put another way, it's not the 90% putting the screws to the stability of the democracy. We don't have enough power in hand to do that.
They're the very image and foundation of "lamestream media" as Republicans imagine it, but it's not easy to notice the beam in one's own TV-watching eye, I guess.
Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
> Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
I'm not sure if the comparison holds. I think a big difference between the US and China, is that in China there's much less of a positive feedback loop between people's attitudes and media coverage. If the people want and would eat up, say, liberal criticism of the Communist government, they're not going to get it from the Chinese media.
So in the US you probably can lay some of the blame on the people: if they start to favor more "ideology and partisanship" over "neutrality," that could cause the media to give them what they want, which then could cause them to want even more "ideology and partisanship." That positive feedback loop then gets you to where we are today, and it's both "the people" and "the media" who are responsible.
Except in China it's not the media itself setting the tone, it's the authorities who give it commands that it has no choice but to obey.
Who gives the American media its commands? Its customers, the people. But it's different because the media also has the choice not to obey, which spreads the responsibility for the outcome between both groups, instead of concentrating it in one or the other.
In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise.
If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.
When media are indoctrinating people and not providing perspectives how do you blame people, even if they have agency and can be considered responsible --just like the wolverine is ultimately responsible but free of blame.
Sure, media is a huge problem. But people behaving like animals, having no empathy, taking no taking time to reflect upon what they say and taking no time to check other perspectives is what's doing the real damage here.
Nevermind the 8 years before that with the black guy.
> the root cause of this problem is not those 60% or whatever then number is on the other side, it’s lack of objective and trustworthy institutions like media.
I agree. It takes 2 to tango; it's still important to apply accountability proportionally.
Here’s the 2020 Democratic party platform [1]. Social healthcare is not on that list—the party supports a public insurance option. I don’t see anything else on the list that “Europe” has—maybe immigration/criminal justice reform?
There is demonstrably one party that pushes a heavily moderate corporatist populist agenda and one party that pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population is not in favor of, from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.) political position carefully engineered since the advent of the Southern Strategy.
Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.
The hatred is flowing mostly from the right, and being enacted into law.
I suspect you're conflating "hatred of strong opinions" with "hatred of people who prioritize their own radical ideology over the good of their country". I don't think many people hate strong opinions.
> and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same.
No, but partisans are the same in that they both are willing to sacrifice the good of the country to see the other side lose on some token issue or another (pronouns, trans bathroom policies, etc).
> pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population
No parties are pushing "Christian nationalist" policies. Whatever your position on abortion, banning it isn't "Christian nationalism". It's not an unreasonable position that human life (and thus human rights) begins before birth. There are some more extreme positions that are unpopular and hard to defend which the right pushes for (prohibiting abortions even when pregnancies are unviable or threaten the life of the mother) but there are also positions that are unpopular and hard to defend that the left pushes for (elective late term abortions).
> from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.)
I think this is eminently fair, and without this the Dakotas would be steamrolled by the likes of NY and CA. Policies that make sense in NYC (restrictions on single family housing, car transportation, gun ownership, etc) would be forced on the rural states because they would be too irrelevant to worry about (why take the time to make sure policies work for the Dakotas when they are politically irrelevant?).
> Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.
I think this is patently absurd--I'm not a Republican nor have I ever voted for a Republican. However, it's not "hostile to people of color" for the GOP to stand with 80% of black Americans in opposition to de-policing policies which have driven the last decade's violent crime surge (which has disproportionately impacted black communities). Similarly, it's not "hostile to queer people" to pass a law which prohibits teaching sexuality ideology (whether left-wing gender ideology or "christian nationalist" ideology).
This is precisely the problem with partisan politics--any attempt to improve the country that falls outside of your narrow ideology is defined in the worst terms ("if you don't support police abolition you're a genocidal white supremacist!", "if you support enforcing immigration policies, you're literally Hitler!", "if you think late term abortions should be illegal, you're a 'Christian nationalist' that hates women"). This is precisely the kind of extremist hatred that is swelling the ranks of the right.
One extreme, but popular, politician says otherwise: https://boingboing.net/2022/07/25/marjorie-taylor-greene-pus...
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-201...
For better or worse, it was all over Chicago (and Twitter) circa 2016-2017.
Has Trump ever admitted that he lost?
Clinton withdrew her acceptance of the 2016 election results <https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-electi...>.
- The FBI was investigating Trump at the same time they were investigating Clinton, but kept silent about it while making her investigation widely known. Trump later committed criminal obstruction of justice into that investigation and was let off the hook due to his immunity as President.
- Trump's campaign manager was handing internal campaign data to Russian operatives, the very same ones who hacked her campaign, and lied about it.
- Trump committed criminal campaign finance violations in the run up to the 2016 election for which his attorney was convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison, but for which Trump himself wasn't due to his immunity as President.
So yeah, maybe she has a right to say "There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJvQHVlkpPI
About 11 or 12 seconds in.
> But Hillary's election denial is better than Trump's!
But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.
You can call it bad behavior to bring up old complaints (due to effects on partisanship, etc), but Hillary isn't engaging in any denial.
IMHO the real people who are in denial about 2016 are the ones who still don't think Russia worked to sink Hillary with hacked material even after the criminal convictions and bipartisan Senate report.
They aren't random individuals, but just because Hillary conceded the election on one occasion doesn't refute the many documented instances in which she and others in her party (at all levels of leadership) alleged or heavily implied the election was stolen.
> But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.
It absolutely is election denial to allege or imply that the election was stolen, as Hillary has done many times over the intervening years, even if you believe there is good reason to deny the election results. Specifically, the original claim was that one party accepts election results and the other party does not--if you agree that some significant number of Democrats believed in Russian collusion even if there was collusion and that some significant number of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen even if it was stolen then you necessarily agree that the original claim (that one party accepts election results and the other does not) is false. You perhaps agree that the Democrats' election denial is better than the Republicans', but there is no room for disagreement that neither party accepts election results.
Let me be clear about what the difference is: the way that Democrats and Clinton behaved in 2016 was legal and constitutionally within their rights. The way Republicans and Trump behaved in 2020 was not only illegal, it was seditious bordering on treasonous. Putting those two reactions into the same bucket in any capacity is an act of historical whitewashing and indeed, false equivalence.
Seems to me like you’re very clearly making an equivalence right there.
One party responded within the bounds of the law and exercised their rights, whereas the other broke the law and tried to overthrow democracy, yet you equate these two responses as “not accepting results”. This is very clearly a false equivalence. If these two responses are equivalent in your mind under the umbrella of election denial, it would seem to mean that no American has ever accepted an election, because one side is always sore about the outcome. You’ve effectively rendered the term election denial meaningless (which is the reason false equivalence is a logical fallacy), so what exactly is your point then?
Regionality > Nationality
tl;dr america is geographically too big and it's really starting to show.
That was the original design with much power belonging to the states. The federal government has gained a lot of power over the last century or so. We're seeing the effects of centralized power over a large and diverse population. Also, many people want the government to solve problems at the federal level, having little to no understanding that other people in other states live their lives very differently and have different priorities.
I'm not sure what else could be abstracted this way so that the citizen wouldn't interact so directly with the federal government. Things like the DoE, and HUD, could probably be eliminated while things like the FDA and EPA really should have federal reach to execute their missions properly (not that they're really doing that).
Realistically we'll just continue to limp along, a zombiefied husk of what our country was meant to be, until the banks and tech elite have bled us dry.
Then we'll likely just implode. Tis the fate of many an empire.
This thing doesn't work as a "European Union." we're all tied together, for better or worse.
Alas you are right, we're all tied together- until we're not :)
> Alas you are right, we're all tied together- until we're not :)
The south tried that once when the battle lines made more sense. We all know what happened there - annihilation. Maybe that is necessary again.
Just look at brexit.
True to the OP's point: I don't really care what happens to the east/west coasts. These people have been trying to legislate my rights away for decades now, so I am very apathetic to their plights.
We're all in the same boat and we have learned the value of rowing together versus throwing others overboard. If that means sometimes you eat crow and other times you serve it up, so be it. I too wish there were more on the menu than crow, but that's why we have scientists: perhaps our grandchildren can eat lobster.
We've all been duped into believing we need a federal government to maintain what we have, and I very strongly believe we do not.
Shit, I would wager that whatever 'economic' distress balkanization would cause could quickly be recouped by the simple fact that we no longer have the feds taking 15-30% of our paychecks and then sending it over seas to eastern europe or israel.
Even balkanized countries have levels of governments. In the scenario you envision, the role of the federal government would pass to some other new entity and you'd still be paying taxes or worse.
Reason is, if you don't have some government then you cannot protect your property and yourself simultaneously. A local warlord or landowner or one from an adjacent state might take your land. A neighboring state might invade your state. Who would protect you? What rights would you have? What court system would you use to gain redress?
You can't really build anything with that kind of attitude. A democracy can't work if you start imagining half your compatriots are enemies, and you'd rather blow up the entire place than let them decide anything.