mozz

mozz , 3 days ago

Still pretty much 10% 😢

That’s not the whole story; raw number of members has ticked up but since unemployment is real low now and the rise is pretty slight, the percent of membership is still dropping. I’d love to be able to tell you it’s different, but that is the reality.

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Boy do I have some good news for you

The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result.

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Exceeding it

It actually makes it a lot more remarkable - short summary is that wages at the bottom end have gone up by like 35% un adjusted, with some but not all of that gain being eaten up by inflation. Wages at the middle and the top have kept pace with inflation or fallen slightly relative to it.

Basically, wages have gone up hugely (especially at the bottom which I suspect is invisible to a lot of the Lemmy-reading and news-article-writing class since they’re in relatively okay tech savvy types of jobs), which was Biden’s doing, even in the face of huge inflation which wasn’t Biden’s doing. If it wasn’t for having to dig out from COVID we’d be in a historic economic boom right now.

(The Vox article I linked goes into some additional detail which I hadn’t been aware of about the inflation piece - TL;DR is that after Covid, Biden had to accept either inflation or unemployment, and he chose inflation where most of the neoliberal garbage that is our political class would have chosen unemployment.)

mozz OP , 12 days ago

wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic

I’m gonna have to go ahead and sorta disagree with you there

I was gonna link you to wage numbers or find something in my post, but it’s actually right there in your link, in the quote from Mark Hamrick. “ Will consumers suddenly feel relieved from the burden of elevated prices? No. But they are supported by a still robust job market that supports employment and wage gains rising above the recent pace of inflation.”

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Hm - I interpreted "recent" as one way, but yeah, that's fair, you could interpret "recent" as him meaning the last year or something. Here's a summary, then, of how wages at the bottom end have kept pace with inflation over the last few years. "Real wages of low-wage workers grew 12.1% between 2019 and 2023." Cumulative inflation over that time span has been about 18% (which is massive), but low-end wages in current dollars also grew by 35% cumulatively in that time, well outpacing inflation.

What numbers are you looking at that say low income wages haven't kept pace with inflation? Like what kind of cumulative current-dollar wages, and what cumulative inflation, are you claiming? If my stuff is propaganda numbers, then what are the real numbers?

Inflation-adjusted wages have ticked very slightly down at the median (like a few percent), gone down a bit at the top end, and gone up significantly both at the bottom end and in the average. It's a complex topic and you can find a variety of numbers both on the income and inflation sides, but they generally all paint that same story (which is, itself, complex enough that you can paint a bunch of different narratives from it, by putting up the numbers for average vs. median vs. lowest-quartile or etc).

mozz OP , 12 days ago

inflation has far outpaced them

This actually isn't fully true -- inflation hasn't outpaced wages at the bottom end, and the only place it's "far" outpaced them is at the top. (The Vox article talks about more details about how and why)

• Cumulative inflation from 2019 to 2023 is about 18% (which is fuckin massive, mostly due to the 2022 spike)

But then:

• Wages at the bottom (10th percentile) in that time went up by about 35% in current dollars, well outpacing inflation
• Median wages basically held steady with inflation, I think they're a couple percent behind it but basically the same as they were just with people unhappier when they look at their grocery bills
• Wages at the top (90th percentile) actually didn't hold pace with that historic inflation; for those people their constant dollar wages have been falling, yes

mozz OP , 12 days ago

See above

mozz OP , 12 days ago

I mean, sure. 🙂 I was trying to consolidate comments into a single stream of conversation since it's already sort of turning into a bickering sprawl, but if you'd like to reply to it here instead of there, then I'm fine with that too:

---

Yes, lower income people in this country are still fucked. If anything I was saying made it sound like I thought they were not, that was not the intent. My point was that Biden has been helping them get out of it, to a certain degree, in a way that's actually very unusual for an American president (they generally don't give a shit about the working class). And that happened even during a historic level of economic challenge to tackle his way out of. And therefore that attacking him by pretending that the opposite is happening is erroneous at best and openly dishonest at worst.

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Dude if you have a disagreement with the article, let's have it. You tried to disagree with it in economic terms and it seems to me like you got tripped up on basic understanding of inflation-adjusted dollars versus non-inflation-adjusted dollars, which is why you're recasting the whole thing in emotional terms like "not some kind of economic saviour," but this new framing doesn't leave a lot to actually discuss. It just takes it into the realm of bickering and fact free opinion judgements.

The majority of people in the country believe that Trump is better on the economy than Biden, even though Trump is a fuckin trade war starting PPP fraud factory closing disaster. The idea that Biden is hurting the economy is not just un-heard-of, it is a majority view, which makes worthwhile a factual discussion of whether or not it is true.

The last article I posted before this morning that dealt with Biden in any capacity was almost a month ago. The thing about me posting article after article you are literally just making up. Comments, I post a lot of.

The article is a little bit explicitly "rah-rah Biden," I'll grant you that. On the other hand, if it's true, then that's legit, and I haven't really seen anything to illustrate that it might not be true other than a pretty large amount of obfuscation in the comments arguing other points that have more convenient answers (like "are low income workers doing okay yet" which they are not).

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Boy do I have some good news for you

The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result.

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Stock market

Who the fuck said anything about the stock market

The article talks about "growth" which is presumably GDP, which is a bullshit metric absolutely, but the overall context is:

The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.

The stock market is based on total crap and can swing up or down by like tens of percents on a whim for literally no reason at all. The only reason stock market even got mentioned tangentially was because Trump said something about the stock market, and they mentioned that at the end of the article.

IDK why I've spent so much time on this. Honestly man it seems like you're literally just saying anything, casting about for some thing you can poo poo or disagree with that has nothing to do with what I or the article are saying.

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Yeah, I definitely don't know why I've spent so much time on this 🥲

This is like trying to explain to a drunk person why they can't drive home

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Yeah that's me, Mr. Dishonest, over here explaining what the cumulative wage growth is, and the cumulative inflation, so that people can compare the two and see which one is higher

I actually originally cited the source which simply said that inflation-adjusted wages had grown by 12%, incorporating both into a single number, but that led to a certain amount of confusion, so I separated it out into the two relevant numbers

You know, like a terribly dishonest person would do

(And yes, the poorest 10% of this country is still fucked and needs quite a lot of help. My point was not that they're doing okay now, it was that they have seen substantial gains relative to where they were, which is a notable thing, and that we should keep doing the things that got them going in the right direction for once in God knows how long.)

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Yeah that's me, Mr. Deceptive, over here explaining what the cumulative wage growth is, and the cumulative inflation, so that people can compare the two and see which one is higher

I actually originally cited the source which simply said that inflation-adjusted wages had grown by 12%, incorporating both into a single number, but that led to a certain amount of confusion, so I separated it out into the two relevant numbers

You know, like a terribly deceptive person would do

(And yes, the poorest 10% of this country is still fucked and needs quite a lot of help. My point was not that they're doing okay now, it was that they have seen substantial gains relative to where they were, which is a notable thing, and that we should keep doing the things that got them going in the right direction for once in God knows how long.)

mozz OP , 12 days ago

I feel like we've been over this at this point

1. There are quite a lot of countries where the poorest 10% are fucked. The US isn't unique in that respect
2. A lot of countries are struggling to hold their heads above water at all, after the Covid apocalypse; the fact that by almost any metric you want to choose, the US is actually gaining right now puts it in an enviable position given what happened
3. The fact that the average worker, and the poorest 10% worker, are both making gains of significant size when usually they are the first ones to get fucked even harder when times are tough, is notable, and "we haven't fixed things for them yet or even close to it" doesn't negate that

Pick any or all

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Dude you're putting up a spirited drive towards this conclusion you are trying to bolster. Sure. One more message maybe.

I don't actually disagree with anything you just said. There are two ways to look at that bleak reality.

1. One way to look at it is, hey, let's look at which direction things have been moving recently, and try to do more of the things that produce gains and less of the things that produce losses, because it's pretty fuckin urgent to fix all that.
2. The other way it to move the goalposts allllllll the way from "wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic" to implicitly blaming Biden for everything that's happened throughout generations of neoliberal betrayal of the American dream, as a way of disagreeing with an article which is accurately describing some notable successes for the people most in need of help right now including wages catching up and exceeding the giant price jumps from the pandemic

I'm not into the idea of indefinitely disagreeing with every new location you wanna move the goalposts to. I will agree with you about how fucked things are on a generational time-scale, and the urgency of fixing it.

Which is why I like identifying honestly when and why things are moving in the right direction

mozz OP , 12 days ago

Thanks Obama

mozz OP , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

New goalposts I do not have time for but fortunately there are a couple of articles which go into why this is wrong pretty comprehensively.

Edit: TL;DR in addition to normal interest-rate stuff and etc, he raised corporate tax by around a trillion dollars which he then sank into among other things domestic manufacturing and infrastructure, and he staffed the NLRB with actual labor people which enabled them to support a lot of these union fights which have been winning gains recently

I keep saying I don’t have time and then you keep suckering me into swinging at wherever the new goalposts are. That’s really it though

mozz , 17 days ago

The potential energy of the spring is “stored” in individual molecules that are pushed into some configuration that they don’t quite want to be in, and they exert force on each other trying to push themselves back apart / back together into being the way they like. As the spring disintegrates, you could model those individual forces, and molecules exerting force on each other would release it into kinetic energy one by one or in groups, as the spring gradually lost its integrity to exist as a singular entity.

(I think that in practice, metals are made of grains, big groupings of molecules which stay pretty much as rigid bodies unless something really crazy happens, so most of the potential energy is force of the grains wanting to go back into their preferred arrangement in relation to other grains. I.e. not in practice at the level of molecule to molecule. But I’m not 100% on that part.)

mozz , 22 days ago

I was absolutely convinced before I read the article that the deputies had been the ones that fucked up the migrants

Of course the Texas takeover of immigration enforcement in Texas is still in early days, there’ll be plenty of time to injure or kill (more) migrants in the weeks and months to come

mozz , 25 days ago

I am fascinated by OP’s posting history, which consists of:

• Russia is winning in Ukraine and it’s all the US’s fault that there’s even a war in the first place
• Texas (often with a sort of pro-GOP culture war angle)
• Almost nothing else

It is an unusual combination.

mozz , 25 days ago

Well, the confluence of "yay GOP" and "yay Russia" isn't all that weird, no... but the exclusive focus on "Texas Texas Texas" with super detailed interest in individual battles in Ukraine, and nothing else (no election, or federal economy, or news from Arizona or over the border in Mexico, etc etc) is a little unusual.

Also, I found this channel that they like posting videos from also to be fascinating, for example with this video:

---

The most important updates are coming from the United States of America, where, according to information we have, Manhattan Court declares former US president Donald Trump guilty on every single one of the charges. This confirms that the clashes, the battle between Joe Biden, the current president of the United States of America, and the former president, Donald Trump, are getting more and more fierce. According to the latest polls, according to information we have, Trump wins 312 to 226 over Biden.

Biden understands that this is a vital question for him. He understands that if he loses, he's not the only one who will lose; a lot of people will suffer significant problems from Trump. Obviously, after court, after all these charges, Trump will, let's say, seek revenge, not just on Biden but on everybody who supports Biden in, let's say, the next possible presidential term of this person.

mozz , 1 month ago

1. An "officer came running up to her vehicle yelling for her to stop. ... Rogers 'panicked and drove the wrong way' down a bus-only lane." Assuming that's accurate, then if the police tell you to stop, and you drive your vehicle away, they're probably going to get physical with you once they catch up to you. That's their job. Their only alternative to responding with physical force at that point is to just shrug shoulders and say "O well we tried" and let someone drive around "panicked" in unexpected places in an environment where little school children are walking around.
2. I do not understand why it's difficult to find just the long, unedited cut of the bodycam footage of what happened. Every single video I was able to find is this weirdly intercut and looped version which focuses on the one part that everyone agrees happened, where you can't really see the context, and then it's overlaid over someone's interpretation of what happened, which is a whole bunch of irritating bullshit.
3. With #2 in mind as a caveat, I think that reading between the lines, what happened is that they stopped her car by blocking it with their cars, pulled her out, put her on the ground to handcuff her, she started screaming about ants, and then after 13 seconds they pulled her up. Then she started struggling, and they put her back on the ground and held her there in the ant pile for a long time while they hogtied her, and that's where all the carpet of ant bites in the photo came from.
4. I am far from an ACAB person, but I do not understand what goes on in US police training that if someone's actively struggling with you, you need to start hurting them until they calm down. I've seen this reaction over and over in police videos, and I think I have literally never once seen it be successful at the supposed goal. It's just not how people operate. I get it that you need to use force if someone's using force against the police to try to avoid getting arrested. That part actually makes sense to me. But the part where someone's resisting getting arrested, and the cops start hurting them and then usually seem for-real surprised that now they're struggling more, is genuinely confusing to me how they can't figure it out.

mozz , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I don't need to; I'm already a connoisseur of Youtube videos with titles like "When entitled suspects attack" or whatever. My observation is that the wrist lock usually converts an angry and struggling person yelling "grahgabgbabrbrae" into an angry and struggling person yelling "grahbcdsbfsdhfbYOURE BREAKING MY ARMsdfkjsdflsdf"

Like I say, this might make me some kind of asshole in Lemmy-world but I am usually not on team suspect. I think if you drive away from the police, or start struggling when they try to put handcuffs on you, the police getting physical with you isn't automatically a sign that they're terrible people and ACAB. That is literally their job at that point, and you're definitely still going to get arrested, just with everyone's day including yours getting worse as a result, and more charges now maybe a felony. I feel like the whole ACAB mentality has blown up the few times a year that one cop somewhere in the country does something really fucked up into this idea that 100% of cops are terrible people and any situation that goes wrong in any way where they're involved is 100% their fault; I don't think that's true. But definitely I do feel like a cop approaching someone who's not on board with what's going on by punishing them and expecting them to get more on board with it as a result is weird.

(One guy had a series called "Verbal Judo" which I liked quite a lot)

mozz , 1 month ago

Some of them. In my direct experience, the number who've behaved that way is 0, though.

I think taking the worst of the police that are findable in a whole country's worth of bodycam footage, and then assigning blame to every single police person based on those people, makes about as much sense as a policeman putting on an "ASAB" patch for "all suspects are bastards," because a certain subset of the people he encounters are pieces of shit, and then deciding that every single person on the "other side" that he interacts with is the enemy.

I mean, some police do do that. I don't think they should. I don't think either that every single person who chooses to do a vitally necessary job for a living becomes the enemy the instant they decide to do that.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Raw milk is not inherently dangerous

Unless there's some sort of deadly disease commonly involved in it (which, in the American food supply right now, is what's up.)

I mean bullets are not inherently dangerous either, but if the environment you're going into involves them moving at high speeds sometimes, you probably want to take some precautions about it.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

That’s just lies made up by Big Copper

mozz OP , 1 month ago

No, Big Chopper speaks only the truth

mozz , 1 month ago

"Oh man. What did they get him for?"

"Wife corruption."

"Oh, shit. Worst kind."

mozz OP , 1 month ago

So one part:

The protests in support of Gaza are testing the bounds of students’ rights to free speech

This was not the viewpoint that led to the creation of the first amendment and all. The actual viewpoint of the founding fathers was that certain things are just inseparable parts of being human -- you're going to talk with people around you, if you're so inclined.

It's not for a government to "regulate" what people are and aren't allowed to say to one another, any more than they could regulate how many bones are in the body. A lot of those foundational documents weren't meant to lay out what the government would and wouldn't allow people to do and the boundaries of government's permissible control -- they were simple acknowledgements of the reality that they were outside the possible control of any government, and that a government that tried to tell people they could say certain things to each other but not other things, was engaged in an impossibility (as well as betraying its own illegitimacy to govern).

mozz OP , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

"You shoulda been down at City Hall sixty thousand a you ... fuckin booing and throwing batteries at the guy who suggested it"

-Doug Stanhope

mozz , 1 month ago

Constables are not cops, in general. IDK how exactly it works in Texas and it looks like it's actually more similar than it usually is, but as a general rule in practice, constables are sort of the "civil matter" version of police (who are chiefly for criminal matters) -- they serve evictions and summonses, child support warrants, traffic detail like in this case, that kind of thing.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Get a gift card and a proton.me address, maybe? IDK

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Have fun having all your (and everyone else's) media supplied by the Koch Brothers because you didn't feel like finding someone worth paying $7/month to

mozz OP , 1 month ago

On my screen it says "Mods are encouraging the users to unintentionally undermine journalism as a workable endeavor, when it's already badly struggling in this country." What's yours say?

mozz OP , 1 month ago

You would describe the current state of the US, and the way the majority of the people in it view the world and how they understand what's going on and what they should do (about climate change, about politics and who to support), to be no problem?

Or you think that where people get their news and their understanding of the world plays no part in the massive problems that are at work in the country?

I'm not trying to get into a big back and forth with you about it. You can have your own opinion on those things and you're welcome to it. But it's not at all a petty thing (to me at least), and it's not any kind of outlandish threat -- it is the simple present day reality. In my opinion.

mozz OP , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Dude I'm super condescending, I know. Sorry if I was coming across insulting which I probably was. But the whole mindset of, we better dodge the paywalls every chance we get, (edit: which, whether it's intended this way or not, might as well translate to) "lol get fucked people who produce the news who are going out of business left and right" irritates me.

I think your mindset of (edit: corrected the quote) "I’ve been having no problem avoiding them for free for decades" and not being interested apparently in looking further into it than that, is harmful. I explained why, probably with more hostility than needed to be there. But I still think it's harmful.

Edit: Made some edits to try to be more fair minded about it

mozz OP , 1 month ago

🗼       🏇

mozz OP , 1 month ago

I fixed my comment to make more of an effort at fairness, then. Cheers.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Ha, I'd like to keep arguing but it seems that me and the Beehaw mods / community simply don't see this issue the same way. Is ok.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

Yeah, that's fair -- if there's a huge variety of news sources posted, so that the model is that you subscribe to /c/news but have to pay $50/month to all sorts of places to actually read the articles (even to subscribe the main sources posted), then it's a problem.

mozz OP , 1 month ago

If you really feel like the Seattle Times knowing your real name is a catastrophe, you can buy one of those Vanilla Visa gift cards and use that for the subscription. I think that's not necessary, but it's certainly an option.