I concur. I work in architecture for a large public cloud provider. I'd definitely double-check that something like this isn't already in the market (or open-source).
It would be interesting to see a novel script though.
"You're right, prices are too high, and wages too low. Especially housing prices, and wages for young men without a college degree.
It's in part the consequences of some things we did.
Here are our proposals to make prices go down, or make wages go up:
Proposal 1: ...."
My deep belief is that the hard part, and the reason Democrats did not do that, is not in the difficulty to find solution.
The hardest part is that it meant recognizing they were, at least in part, responsible for the problem.
The second hardest part was recognizing that the problem was hurting a category of people that's "outside of the tribe".
So, faced with a complex problem, they decided to deny the problem existed altogether, focussed on something else (not necessarily unworthy issues, but, simply, not the one at hand.)
"Ventre affamé n'a point d'oreille."
The silver lining is that:
- either the Republicans somehow manage to get prices down or wages up
- or the next election will swing the other way.
It's still, after all, no matter what, "the economy, stupid" - just, the real economy, no the the fake financial one.
Also, it's striking that one of the problems on which the Democratic Party focussed did win in the ballot : if I read it correctly, in most of the places where women's reproductive rights were on the ballots, the position of the Democratic Party prevailed.
Why they decided to be myopic, and assumed that they had to defend the rights of women _or_ the rights of workers, and could not do both, is a bit beyond me.
It feels like democrats were talking to women, LGTB people, and some elites.
They completely forgot about the other half of the electorate, and when reminded of their existence and issues, they considered the other stuff more important. This result shouldn't surprise anyone.
In part, maybe. And at the very end of the list of proposal, after you've explained how you're going to fix the problem, you can, if you have time to spare, defend that you were not entirely responsible for the whole of the problem.
But, realize that any time you spend defending yourself is not spent explaining how you're going to fix the problem. It may be unfair, and that's one of the nicest aspect of democracy : given that people in power keep changing, at some point they don't feel bound to the choices made by previous governments, even of their own party, and can spend time trying to fix problems.
I've read conflicting opinions about the effect of Trump trade wars (pre COVID), how the pandemic was handled pre Biden, and how the pandemic was handled post Biden, on inflation.
I much doubt economits would seriously put 100% of the blame on any particular side.
Hence the "in part". Which, I repeat, is a way to acknowledge the complexity, and move on to the interesting question : whether it's your fault or not, what are you going to do to _fix the problem_.
Next election is in two years, and I suspect neither housing prices nor groceries are going to fall any time soon - so policy proposals are not going to waste.
Well, for starters, a response that would have worked won't involve both of these contradictory positions at the same time:
Position 1: Prices can never go down again unless inflation is negative and we get "deflation." Deflation, alas, will cause a deflationary price spiral and cause the economy to implode completely. Why? Well, reasons. Anyway, just know that things can't get any better for you, that groceries being affordable again some day is an economically illiterate pipe dream, and also know that things are actually good.
Position 2: Also, we'll just force stores to lower prices. Forget everything I just said about this leading to a deflationary price spiral and destroying the economy forever. Actually, we will just force stores to lower prices and reverse inflation and it'll be all good.
More reasonable would be to explain the grocery prices will likely never come back down but we can increase workers' wages through certain policies. Biden's policy of opening the border to undocumented labor is not a policy that I believe will help increase the wages of those concerned about the cost of groceries.
>Biden’s immediate focus is on the 3,100-kilometer southern border with Mexico, where Trump tried to keep thousands of migrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from entering the U.S.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/02/biden-signs-3-executive-orders...
>Mayorkas assured senators at a confirmation hearing last month that a plan to end the Trump-brokered “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring Central Americans to await an asylum decision in Mexico won’t necessarily happen immediately. He urged people not to rush to the border hoping for more favorable treatment.
... A few moments later.....
https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/monthly-record-for-feb...
>The nation’s besieged southern border set a record for February(2024) migrant encounters with 189,922 attempted crossings as officials brace for an expected spring surge, according to new Customs and Border Patrol data.
>The figure eclipses the prior February record of 166,010 encounters, set in 2022 and 156,000 during the same month last year(2023).
The best solution imo would have been 1. to run a candidate not associated with Biden. 2. To say "inflation happened globally" and double and triple down on that. Half baked solutions like you're suggesting from someone associated with Biden + gaslighting the public that its not that bad were not the answers people wanted.
Position 3: Introduce policies that stimulate domestic production and decrease foreign competition. This will lower prices without forcing domestic producers out of business.
Reduced competitive pressure is a boon to business.
The less competitive pressure there is, the more likely it is that new businesses will form -- it lowers the bar and makes it easier to start new ventures.
The first part is arguable, the second isn't - it just isn't true. Usually, you get large, monopolistic industries that are propped up by the state. So worse products and services than what's available internationally for higher costs as you don't have to compete against all comers. Only a few countries have ever escaped this trap - there's a great Odd Lots about it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-is-how-industrial...
There isn't, really. Inflation is irredeemable and you just have to be overwhelmingly better in other aspects, which she wasn't. The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
> The solution is to not have allowed it to happen in the first place.
How, exactly?
The biggest causes of inflation were stimulus, supply-shock, and housing prices.
Stimulus started under Trump and was the correct response to COVID. Without it we would have had even worse economic suffering that we did. Inflation was the lesser-of-two-evils.
The supply shock was global, and there probably wasn't much to do about it, besides maybe some more supply-side stimulus.
Housing is just a shit-show, but people have been grinding to get more built to address the problems for years.
But stimulus was the thing that could have been changed the most, yet it kept us from having a much, much worse recession.
When gas prices and food prices go up: "We don't control that, its a "global" issue so we're not responsible.
When gas prices and food prices go down: "See everybody! Look! Our economic policies ARE working! You just have to trust us!"
This all we heard the entire four years Biden was in office. People are not stupid. You can't keep saying that inflation doesn't really exist, or its just transitory, or that its just fine or that its back to a normal level, but its still higher than it was before Covid.
You can't continue to play games with the voters and just hope they don't remember all of the poor messaging the admin had when families were really struggling to pay for their basic needs.
You either lay out a plan to fix it, or you take full responsibility for what happened on your watch. Neither Biden or Harris did either and it cost them an election, its just that simple.
There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible. Taking fake responsibility would imply fault and suggest that voters ought to switch sides to the party which actually mismanaged the covid response which is absolutely nonsensical.
>> There isn't a way to fix it and they actually aren't responsible.
"Google, how do you fix inflation?"
We know inflation is the consequence of many factors, but it can be controlled by different entities at each stage. The two groups most instrumental in the fight against inflation are The Federal Reserve and the government.
The Fed using interest rate increases to make lending and investing more expensive is an example of monetary policy.
The Fed misread warnings in the spring of 2021 when it was clear to some that inflation was spreading. The Fed argued that inflation would be transitory and that it resulted from unusual circumstances, ranging from supply chain issues related to the abnormal demand that came from the end of the pandemic.
The government can use fiscal policy to fix inflation by increasing taxes or cutting spending. Increasing taxes leads to decreased individual demand and a reduction in the supply of money in the economy. As you can imagine, fiscal policy isn’t very popular because raising taxes is a difficult political move. The last thing that we want to hear when inflation is rising is that our taxes will also increase.
The government could use other fiscal policies to lower inflationary pressures. If Congress were to limit pandemic relief spending and focus on not making the deficit worse, that would assist in reducing inflation.
So no, there absolutely is ways to fix it and they 100% were responsible for it. The problem is when you constantly act like there isn't a problem, by the time they realized they had to fix it? It meant the cure is going to be worse than the disease - usually in the form of either cooling off the economy with interest rate hikes, or pushing the economy into a recession or increasing taxes or gasp cutting spending.
This is not graduate level economics we're talking here - its pretty common knowledge stuff. But if you say Biden wasn't responsible for the inflation on his watch, then by your logic you would have to excuse every president who had a poor economy because "its not their fault" and "there's no way to fix it."
Unfortunately, most people (like myself) know that's a load of poppycock and voted accordingly.
Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?
It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib. It wouldn't do anything about price gouging either and it would certainly have turned America against Biden and Harris. Its just a grab bag of bad ideas.
Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tarriffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
>> Are you arguing that they should have either raised taxes or introduced austerity measures as the recovery was just beginning because Google told you it would have helped?
My point was that even a search engine AI will tell you there's way to fix it because your entire premise is that it wasn't fixable and therefore, not the admins fault. Clearly not the case on either point.
>> It would not have undone prior inflation and it could have strangled the recovery in the crib.
Dude, where are you getting this? Inflation was 1.4% when he took office.
Biden’s claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he became president is not close to true. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4%. The Biden-era inflation rate did peak at about 9.1% – but that peak occurred in June 2022, after Biden had been president for more than 16 months. The March 2024 inflation rate, the most recent available rate at the time Biden made these comments, was about 3.5%, up from about 3.2% the month prior.
This is a myth. Harris was proposing using Carter era price controls to try and go after "price gouging". Not sure how old you are, but guess what happened when Carter tried that in the 1970's? It lasted less than 2 years before Carter compromised with Congress on a “windfall profits tax” proposal.
The price controls resulted in a fuel-rationing system that made available about 5 percent less oil than was consumed before the controls. Consumers scrambled and sat in lines to ensure they weren’t left without. Gas stations found they only had to stay open a few hours a day to empty out their tanks. Because they could not raise prices, they closed down after selling out their gas to hold down their labor and operating costs, Mr. Sowell said.
When you use price controls, you get less of what you want, not more. This creates what we've already seen in the 1970's as noted above.
This also happened with Bruce Springsteen and how he was pricing his tickets:
Springsteen used to sell tickets to his concerts for very low prices because he wanted ordinary working men and women to be able to afford them. What actually happened: Ticket resellers bought up all the tickets. So a ticket with a face value of $30 went for $100, except $70 of that went to a third party. At some point it occurred to Springsteen that if tickets to his shows were selling for $100, it didn’t make a lot of sense for $70 of that to go to a middleman who not only didn’t write “Born to Run,” he didn’t even write “Workin’ on a Dream.” Years ago, Springsteen dropped his “friend of the working man” pricing policy, which is why the last time I went to one of his concerts the face value of the ticket was $350. Is Springsteen guilty of “price gouging” for denying ticket resellers the opportunity to make gigantic profits from his work and artistry? Were those resellers guilty of “price gouging” for selling those tickets for what people were willing to pay?
>> Also your preferred candidate has said he is going to drastically increase prices with massive tariffs. This isn't strictly inflation but the effect on your wallet will be the same.
This isn't how tariffs work. Tariffs are put in place to discourage people from buying products produced in China and instead buy American made goods and services. They work because people buy less goods from China. Those who do, then pay more so along with the increased revenue, the government is able to generate revenue from the tariffs. If you don't want to pay more for Chinese goods, then you have plenty of options to buy stuff from American producers or other countries like Taiwan, Japan and other countries.
Because I live in a market driven, capitalistic economy, I can make choices to avoid paying more for Chinese goods, or if I want to, I can still buy those goods, albeit at an elevated price point. Nobody is forcing you to buy Chinese goods. Therefore, no, it won't affect my wallet the same because I still have the choice of whether to buy those goods and services or go somewhere else. This is the complete opposite of how price controls work where the government is rationing products in order to maintain a price point.
>> I would talk to actual economists instead of Google.
I have a minor in economics, two of my best friends work in finance and graduated from Ivy League schools and worked on Wall St for a decade. My father was a self made millionaire and entrepreneur. I currently own two businesses and deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The fact remains that the Biden admin denied that inflation was happening. By the time they decide to act, it was so bad that any solution would involve quite a bit of pain as I previously pointed out. Had they just admitted inflation was going up, they could've acted sooner to deal with it. Ignoring it put them in a place where you either had to do nothing and allow a long winded market correction (which is what they did) or trigger a recession, or raise taxes, something nobody would be ok with - which then would've had implications for Biden's re-election which they weren't going to jeopardize.
So yeah, I do talk with actual people who actually know how the markets and the economy works and I myself actually know how this stuff works because I've been dealing with it for over two decades, with both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Actual working economists weighed in on both Biden's handling of the recovery especially in context of an executive only strategy with a do nothing congress and the wisdom of Trumps tariffs. I choose to believe their analysis not yours. The fact that you think posting Google AIs take on the matter is useful or proves something indicates a deficit in understanding not only of the topic but how and why humans communicate.
Trump suggested ruinously high tariffs not only on China but everywhere other than the US and believed that this would be not a spur to move people to US goods but somehow a continuous tax on other countries. He also suggested putting this forward immediately to open the money spigot to our country that would distribute this new found wealth.
There is no way that our economy aligns around home produced goods that don't even exist in sufficient quantity nor price in any reasonable time frame. Instead you get massive price increases in price while people scramble, trade wars, supply shortages, knock on effects for people whose own economic activities require goods they can't get at a reasonable price and price increases in domestic goods and services which require foreign goods and services (most of them) and recession.
This is without the additional shock to the system of putting tens of millions of productively employed individuals in concentration camps and the widespread unrest that is sure to follow that action.
None of this positions the US well to invest in domestic goods because people don't invest in the middle of unrest. If Trump keeps his campaign promises the entire economy is going down the crapper.
1. Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem, empathize, be mad, let them vent, but don't really focus on a solution.
2. Advocate austerity as a solution to inflation. Might be less economically ideal, but more politically viable.
edit to add: iow, Harris and other Dems could have thrown Biden under the bus a bit to try to avoid some of the blame. It's cold, and Biden directed an actually decent response to the supply-shock-driven inflation, but it'd be a kind of shrewdness like getting Biden to drop out that might have helped.
> Try the Trump/populist playbook on the topic: identify the problem,
And ideally put the blame on people who don't have any/much political or economic power within the country, like immigrants. Us vs them. "If we just get rid of 'them' everything will be fine"
The court ruled that at the time, when the State Police opened the file, they had no reason to believe that a warrant was required. While the search was later ruled unconstitutional, no court had ruled it was unconstitutional *at the time of the search*. One of the cornerstones of American jurisprudence is that you cannot go back in time and overrule decisions based on contemporary jurisprudence.
From the opinion: 'the exception can also apply where officers “committed a
constitutional violation” by acting without a warrant under circumstances
that “they did not reasonably know, at the time, [were] unconstitutional.”'
If you're interested, the discussion of a good faith exemption (and why fruit of the poison tree doesn't apply here) begins at page 40 of the doc.
As someone not from the US the fact that "uwu we didn't know" is an adequate defense for the police to do something illegal is really weird. Is there some crucial context I'm missing?
It dates back to the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws. Meaning, the government can't retroactively make something illegal. Which is a good thing, IMO.
So, for example, it's illegal at the federal level to manufacture machine guns (and I'm not going to get into a gun debate or nuances as to what defines a machine gun--it's just an example). But a machine gun is legal as long as it was manufactured before the ban went into place. Because the government can't say "hey, destroy that thing that was legal to manufacture, purchase, and own when it was manufactured."
This concept is extrapolated here to say "The cops didn't do anything illegal at the time. We have determined this is illegal behavior now, but we can't use that to overturn police decisions that were made when the behavior wasn't illegal. In the future, cops won't be able to do this."
The government has totally said “destroy the thing that we said was legal to manufacture, purchase, and own when it was manufactured.” That was the entire point of the bump stock ban, which attempted to reclassify an item that they had previously said was not a machine gun into a machinegun, and therefore illegal to own (and was always illegal to own, so they weren’t going to compensate people for them either).
More strictly, machine guns aren’t banned by the federal government, but rather you have to have paid a tax to own it, and they’ve banned paying the tax for gun made after X date. If they decide to ban the ownership, grandfathering is not guaranteed.
> Because the government can't say "hey, destroy that thing that was legal to manufacture, purchase, and own when it was manufactured."
Actually that's a totally normal way for bans to work.
If a state decides to ban a book from school libraries, the libraries don't get to keep the books on the shelves because they already had it.
The ban on ex post facto laws merely means that, if a ban on a given book is passed today a librarian can't be punished for having it on the shelves yesterday.
Grandfathering in exceptions is just politics - make a bitter pill easier to swallow for the people most impacted; delay the costs of any remediation; deal with historical/museum pieces; and simplify enforcement.
>It dates back to the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws.
Not really, that's not now constitutionality works with respect to the government. Ex post facto is when the government wants to act against you, not when you want the government to behave. They use new decisions regarding constitutionality to undo previous decisions all the time, they just don't want to in this specific case and are using the "well they would have been able to get a warrant anyway if they had known they'd needed one" to justify it.
It wasn't illegal (unconstitutional) at the time they did it, which is different from not knowing. They would have had to see the future to know.
Also keep in mind "illegal" and "unconstitutional" are different levels - "illegal" deals with specific laws, "unconstitutional" deals with violating a person's rights. Laws can be declared unconstitutional and repealed.
Laws can also be unconstitutional and remain a law--the law just can't be enforced. For example, in the state of Texas sodomy is still technically illegal, just the law is unenforceable. But if the Supreme Court overrules previous court decisions and says anti-sodomy laws are constitutional, the Texas law immediately becomes enforceable again.
I don't know. I feel that if something is declared "unconstitutional" today, then it was always unconstitutional (from inception of or amendment to the constitution). Unlike "illegal" in which laws can come and go, so something that is illegal today can be legal tomorrow. And just like "ignorance is no excuse for breaking a law", I don't thing ignorance should be an excuse for doing something unconstitutional.
Just another way cops can be terrible at their job and get away with it. If only citizens could use the Chappelle defense, "I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that".
Let's be clear. This guy had CSAM and was caught using digital forensics. The cops would've been able to secure the search warrant at the time had they been required to do so.
This isn't some innocent person who is spending time in prison because of a legal technicality.
I understand but this is literally how rights are eroded away. It's all good when it's the worst people on the planet, but very quickly it's abused against every one else. Once these rights go away, they don't come back.
The systemic downsides of police overreach happen whether or not a particular person was guilty. In general, throwing out the evidence is an effective way to fight back against overreach. I'm not worried about this guy, I'm worried about everyone else.
The idea that they would have been able to get a warrant limits the damage, but it's still iffy.
> In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people.
He fired 528 people. That's what he did.
Also, he impacted a lot more than the 528 people he fired. Those who didn't get fired have to take on the work that was being done by their fired colleagues without an increase in pay.
As someone who has worked for less than $40,000 a year, and someone who now makes more than the average pay of someone at DropBox--I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse." Yes, it'd suck to be a laid-off staff member of a university making $40,000. It also sucks to be a laid-off cashier at a grocery store making $16,500.
This talk of money also ignores the negative effects on mental health from being laid-off.
But the most important point here is that a CEO making an obscene amount of money takes "full responsibility" and... still gets paid an obscene amount of money. Easy to take responsibility if you have 0 consequences.
> I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse."
That's wasn't the point of my comment. The point was the $125,000 severance package. You have someone making $40,000 a year getting laid off with little notice and no money to live on. That's bad. Then you have someone getting laid off but the company is giving them another $125,000. To the extent that that's bad, it's something that most folks could never dream of.
First thing I do when playing a multiplayer game with proximity voice chat is to turn voice chat off. Makes play sessions much more enjoyable.
Sure you may miss the 5% of chat that is actually tactical and relevant to the game, but it's a very small price to pay in order to avoid edgelords and other toxic people.
I appreciate Valve for having both an in-game skill score as well as a behavior score. Once your behavior is maxed out chat becomes an entirely different experience.
Is that simply cultural? DOTA is well over a decade old. If everyone's toxic and behavior is self-moderated, then toxic behavior is not just normalized but reinforced.
And as someone with that many hours too... Go check a 8k behavior score or below. The system is working. It's just that the depths of hell are deeper than people think.
It could be more aggressive at lowering score tho, true. Used to be. They "buffed" the gain per 20 matches last December, but it was great before (And even lowered the scores of streamers that had it coming).
This sucks because, when used appropriately, prox voice chat works really well and adds depth to multiplayer. A lot of games feel really dead without it. But finding pubbies that use it appropriately is practically impossible.
> As a gamer dad, I try to show my kid better games to play, but because they aren't free, his friends can't play. Just drives him to keep playing and wanting more Robux. It's compounded when his favorite Youtubers play...
If there's a paid game your kid really likes, perhaps you can talk to his friend's parents and buy the friend a copy of the game. ...I say talking to the friend's parents first, because just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy.
But buying friends copies of a game we want to play together is something my friend group routinely does and we're all adults with disposable income.
Excellent idea. Two additional reasons: (1) many parents would want veto power on what kids spent their time on and are exposed to, including video games; and (2) you could suggest quietly buying the game through the parents, to avoid complicating the kids' relationship with getting stuff.
Some other, more expensive, activities (e.g., tennis lessons together, when the family of one of the BFFs isn't affluent) are harder for more people to do this, but video games are relatively inexpensive.
> just gifting a game to the friends would be creepy
lol well this certainly depends on how it's done. Walking up to them in a trench coat and handing them a disc? Probably creepy. But you could also just, like, send them a gift key on Steam...
Unless this person is literally Santa Claus, I suspect a lot of parents might question the motives of a grown man sending gifts to their children without their knowledge.
The key is “without their knowledge”. Seems like an easy thing to explain to a parent. Plus it’s reasonable you’d ask the parents so they have a chance to say yes/no to the game.
It's not just GitHub and it's not just because they don't want to pay bug hunters. In my career, I have escalated multiple bugs to my employer(s) in which the response was 'working as intended'. And they wouldn't have to pay me another cent if they acknowledged the issue.
In my experience, there was two reasons for this behavior:
1. They don't want to spin dev cycles on something that isn't directly related to revenue (e.g. security)
2. Developers don't have the same mindset as someone who's whole job is security. So they think something is fine when it's really not.
At least where I work, RSUs are often dangled to you as a way to justify a lower base salary. RSUs are built into the 'compensation philosophy', wherein the RSUs are combined with salary to calculate total compensation.
You're underpaid with regard to salary, so you'll lose a lot more by foregoing RSUs than you would if you were just paid a fair base salary without RSUs.
The other day I was talking to my wife about my frustrations at work, and she said "Well, just don't quit before you get that RSU vest." And I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had such conversations.
It would be interesting to see a novel script though.
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