Funny events in anti-woke world

[tstorm823]

The bank is actually causing inflation for the reasons above, and would still be aiming for those inflation targets irrespective of government fiscal policy.

And when the US government takes on debt, the actual act is financing the spending through bonds, many of which are purchased by the Federal Reserve through the issuance of new money that screws up their inflation targets, because the government being able to pay its bills is a higher short term priority than inflation management.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

That's not misinformation. It is merely something you disagree with because you have a fringe, whackjob understanding.



Ok, so you don't mean "the left" (whatever that means), you mean public health agencies took decisions you disagree with.

But you've demonstrated no competent understanding of the issue, so i see no reason to care much about your disagreements.



No, you posted the rate in the United States. Wakefield is a British fraudster who wrote in a British journal that held/holds international regard in hundreds of countries.

Over 90,000 people died of measles last year. Obviously the specific impact of the study will be difficult to quantify, but in the UK alone, the incidence of measles lept from ~50 in 1998 to over 900 in 2007. That fraudulent study was the turning point-- and cases rose globally too. Vaccine "scepticism", and the false fear of a link to autism, are still commonly cited reasons for refusal.

That is misinformation, it was never true and isn't true now. Paul Offit said the covid vaccine doesn't prevent infection...

They took decisions that were not backed by science while claiming they were following the science. There was literally no reason to close beaches.

Show me numbers where deaths increased say during the period of 10 years after the Wakefield study. The media was also mainly at fault, the actual Wakefield study even says it found no association between vaccines and the syndrome they observed. Honestly, the study shouldn't have even been reported on because it's a study that showed literally nothing (even if it was faked). The news constantly still reports bullshit studies all the time though.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I know better than some of them... I know better than all of you is the important part though.

Oh, we all know that you think you do. You dismiss legitimate expertise and lived experience out-of-hand because they don't jibe with your worldview, and when irrefutable proof is provided (which it has been, often), you reframe the argument and then declare yourself the winner.

That's the reason you hang around here, isn't it? You have never posted in any section of this forum but the Current Events one. You just want yourself a nice, tiny arena you can call yourself the champion of, where all your "opponents" only engage with you because it's mildly amusing. No one here takes you seriously, Tstorm, and no one here (with maybe one or two exceptions, both of whom are just as bad) believes you. You are a clown, and we're not laughing with you, we're laughing at you.

 

[tstorm823]

You have never posted in any section of this forum but the Current Events one.

Bullcrap! I posted a ton in Religion and Politics.

 

[bluegate]

No, You have that backwards. Prices go up is equal to money being less valuable.

You're the embodiment of a non-sequitur. It seems we're both having a different conversation.

Spoiler: Just for the heck of it, here's the conversation I was having

You: Inflation is a consequence of the purchasing value of money dropping

Me: Care to explain? Generally it's understood to be the other way around, actually.

You: When people get more money, goods become more sought after, increasing their prices.

Me: That's inflation caused by the increase of purchasing value of people's money, not by a drop of purchasing value.

You: No, You have that backwards. Prices go up is equal to money being less valuable.

 

[Silvanus]

That is misinformation, it was never true and isn't true now. Paul Offit said the covid vaccine doesn't prevent infection...

You routinely misrepresent what Paul Offit says (or ignore it when you don't like it), while also totally ignoring the wider scientific community outside of a handful of your favourite figures. I have no faith that you're speaking accurately here either.

They took decisions that were not backed by science while claiming they were following the science. There was literally no reason to close beaches.

Ok, thank you for your opinion on covid public health policy, but once again: that's not what we're discussing.

Show me numbers where deaths increased say during the period of 10 years after the Wakefield study.

What specific numbers are you asking for? Global deaths from measles in 1998 to 2008?

Why? You think some correlation, or lack thereof, would settle this question? Think again (or in your case, for the first time). We are talking about high tens of thousands of deaths annually; millions of cases, often in low-information communities. That number would be shaped by literally millions of factors. Isolating quantitative, definitive, attributable numbers for one such factor is impossible.

What we can do is look at the media reach the study had, and common features of anti-vax rhetoric. And wouldn't you know, the links that Wakefield fraudulently pointed to, they keep coming up.

 

[tstorm823]

You're the embodiment of a non-sequitur. It seems we're both having a different conversation.

Spoiler: Just for the heck of it, here's the conversation I was having

You: Inflation is a consequence of the purchasing value of money dropping

Me: Care to explain? Generally it's understood to be the other way around, actually.

You: When people get more money, goods become more sought after, increasing their prices.

Me: That's inflation caused by the increase of purchasing value of people's money, not by a drop of purchasing value.

You: No, You have that backwards. Prices go up is equal to money being less valuable.

I don't think it particularly matters what conversation you're having, inflation isn't caused by an increase in the purchasing power of money. When people talk of the "purchasing power", they are describing what you can get with a fixed unit of currency, what for example a single dollar is worth. If the purchasing power of money increases, a dollar buys more. People having higher quantities of money isn't described with the term purchasing power, that term is for describing what a unit of currency does without considering how many of those units you have. Circling back to the concept of real wages, real wages are the combination of how much money people are being paid and the changes in purchasing power of that money.

 

[Trunkage]

In a sense, that is correct. Private spending does not lead to inflation, public spending does. Because when private interests run out of money, they run out of money. When the government runs out of money, it takes on debt, some of which is to the Federal Reserve that issues new money. Issuing more money into the same sized economy decreases the purchasing power of that money, which makes the government run out faster. Inflation is not just a term for prices going up, supply and demand can make a price go up or down, and private spending can cause that. Inflation is the term for the overall price of everything going up, which is a consequence of the purchasing value of money dropping, which no amount of private spending will ever cause.

*Looks at the trillions of dollars propping up the AI craze and Crypto*
Many big companies find a loop hole to get around the 'running out of money' problem. Many companies get billions of dollars sunk into it with turning a profit

Right now, a bunch of money is being pulled from many sector to pay for sectors. Right now, the numbers look good economically but are terrible the average worker. The rich have reduce the inflation to what they are purchasing and pushing that inflation onto the working class.

The government can effect the whole ecomony. The rich can do a similar effect for sectors. And the governement can cover up what the rich are doing to make the overall numbers look good

Becuase a lot of economics is just looking good

 

[tstorm823]

Right now, the numbers look good economically but are terrible the average worker.

By what evidence do you think this is the case? I agree, some economic indices are bullcrap that regular people don't care about. But at least for the US, real wages are rising, inflation is back to the standard 3%, its especially cooled in the most essential things (groceries are under 3%, gasoline is down, clothing is down), the one essential thing increasing substantially is electricity, which will burst with the bubble you think is hiding the issues. Even housing is showing signs of improvement, cause the prices aren't coming down (yet), but the increase stalled out a while ago, and now houses at those prices are starting to sit unsold, price drops look to be imminent.

 

[Trunkage]

And you still can't admit you don't know what "community benefit" means with regards to vaccines. There's no reason to mandate a vaccine that provided no community benefit.

A community benefit would be some like reducing overall stress, reduce suicidal thoughts, educational poverty, financial stress, nutrition and physical exercise

Do you know what is extremely stressful? Having to turn up to work in person to pay the bills with a high chance of catching covid. This will lead to short term economic drains with the possibility of losing your job, extended hospital visits leading to poverty, permanant health compications and death. Suicidal thoughts dramatically increaee if you have been bankrupted from pay hospital bills or your loved one died. As soon as people started dying, business has to stop or slow down because they no longer had workers. Eg. Meat packers had tl shut down due to so many people permanent physically being damaged or died. Meat was in short supply. US school had to send in army to teacher becuase so many teachers died. Which is terrible for children who watch their teachers die and get a poor substitue

Stopping Covid from spreading does exactly what you want

And this does not take into account that no government, even the US, only focus on stopping the spread. They put in mental health program to help with thr stress. They sent food, particularly to poor children, to make sure everyone had enough.

[/quote]What the fuck are you talking about? You're just going on and on about stuff I never said. When the fuck did I lie about how many people died? You all lied about masks and still lie about masks, nobody has put forth any conclusive evidence that they work (find me any article from before 2020 that actually said masks do anything, that was the science and that is still the science because we only did a very small handful of actual decent mask studies). I said that you can't tell people to not socialize for months/years at a time and not have massive mental health issues. Telling people that they can't do things outside or kids can't play sports and whatnot were policies that helped reduce stress? They removed swings and other equipment from parks. That had the opposite affect and why I was very much against that.
[/QUOTE]
Just to be clear. I have kids and they were small during Covid. We did exercises with them. Dance teacher did zoom training sessions. We had small sand pits and mud kitchens. We bought a trampoline and scooter for the front verandah. We actively encourage spending time on messenger kids talking to their friends. Thats not something I would done before 2020.

You could do things different to help your child. All you are showing is a lack of creativity, ingenunity, lazy and actual giving a fuck about kids.

As to the claims about lies. You just made a claim about Offit which can only be seen as a lie. Pretending he's anti- Vaccine is like saying the sun is blue. Stop lying. Stop trying to kill people

 

[Agema]

By what evidence do you think this is the case? I agree, some economic indices are bullcrap that regular people don't care about. But at least for the US, real wages are rising, inflation is back to the standard 3%, its especially cooled in the most essential things (groceries are under 3%, gasoline is down, clothing is down), the one essential thing increasing substantially is electricity, which will burst with the bubble you think is hiding the issues. Even housing is showing signs of improvement, cause the prices aren't coming down (yet), but the increase stalled out a while ago, and now houses at those prices are starting to sit unsold, price drops look to be imminent.

Broadly, this is fair. With the Covid / Ukraine invasion inflation receding, things are returning to normal and beginning to look more positive. Although I'm pretty sure the target inflation rate is 2%, not 3%.

There's also a big caveat in there: if the AI bubble pops, it's going to cause a lot of damage. It'll chop a huge amount off the stock market, wiping out a lot of billions in people's investments, and very much has the potential to cause a recession which will spread the pain far and wide. An improvement in the price of electricity will probably feel trivial.

 

[tstorm823]

There's also a big caveat in there: if the AI bubble pops, it's going to cause a lot of damage. It'll chop a huge amount off the stock market, wiping out a lot of billions in people's investments, and very much has the potential to cause a recession which will spread the pain far and wide. An improvement in the price of electricity will probably feel trivial.

But are they investments that I care about? It's mostly people gambling on hype-based market speculation. All the world needs to do is ignore them losing their money to other degenerate gamblers, and everything is fine.

The only thing that seems unclear about this to me is whether the bubble will pop on its own because none of the businesses are profitable, or whether it will be destroyed from the outside by governments as more people realize that making porn and helping kids cheat at school are the maybe the least hated things being done with AI. Like, at work yesterday I was helping someone set up radio transmission frequencies on a GPS receiver for surveying work, and he was in the wrong place, because google's AI overview was feeding him instructions from a totally different manufacturer. I'm so tired of the algorithmic lying.

 

[Agema]

But are they investments that I care about? It's mostly people gambling on hype-based market speculation. All the world needs to do is ignore them losing their money to other degenerate gamblers, and everything is fine.

But them losing money is a big deal, and the world doesn't just ignore them. They're not just "degenerate gamblers", there's also a load of small time investors, and it's the pension schemes which hold the retirement funds of the masses, and banks. Losses hit pretty much everyone. They will then tighten their belts, cut spending and pull investments from elsewhere to cover gaps, etc. so the pain spreads even further. And that's the sort of reason a stock market crash can cause a recession, unemployment, etc.

 

[tstorm823]

They will then tighten their belts, cut spending and pull investments from elsewhere to cover gaps, etc. so the pain spreads even further.

These are all entirely optional things. There is no obligation to react this way to an investment bubble, it is irrational behavior that causes all of the damage.

 

[Agema]

These are all entirely optional things. There is no obligation to react this way to an investment bubble, it is irrational behavior that causes all of the damage.

Irrespective of whether they are optional or irrational, they are nevertheless things that regularly happen, and telling everyone that they are optional and irrational has, regrettably, completely failed to stop them happening.

 

[Silvanus]

Irrespective of whether they are optional or irrational, they are nevertheless things that regularly happen, and telling everyone that they are optional and irrational has, regrettably, completely failed to stop them happening.

There's also the fact that a lot of pensions, ETFs, and various bank accounts are backed by investments in these things. Individual contributors generally don't know all the constituent investments that back them. Or worse, they may be backed by debt that is in turn backed by those investments.

You can call it irrational to place money in these places. But we are continually told its unwise not to make our money "work for us". Hell, we may even be punished with worse credit scores if we don't. And the organisations that offer them are notoriously opaque with where the investments are. In the case of pensions, depending on your workplace you might not even get a choice!

 

[Agema]

You can call it irrational to place money in these places. But we are continually told its unwise not to make our money "work for us". Hell, we may even be punished with worse credit scores if we don't. And the organisations that offer them are notoriously opaque with where the investments are. In the case of pensions, depending on your workplace you might not even get a choice!

It is unwise not to make our money work for us, because the system has been set up to make it so. Essentially, if you do not invest, saved money tends to degrade in value due to inflation. Even if you give it to a bank with an interest rate that exceeds inflation, the bank will invest it. You might also be able to invest in other assets, of course, although the risk of that is massive increase in asset prices: the obvious being housing, and we all know about the unhappiness there currently. Much of the modern fine art trade is not art lovers (as yesteryear), it's investors.

But I would actually agree that it is societal preferable to push us to make our money work. There are zillions of people out there with ideas to make our lives better who need to be loaned money to bring those ideas to fruition, and their successes will also then ultimately feed into the general wealth.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

So this is what amounts to "justice" in Trump's America: A three-year-old girl forced to act as her own lawyer in front of an immigration judge.

Three-year-old child forced to serve as her own attorney in Tucson immigration court -

More than a dozen undocumented minors were forced to make their case in front of an immigration judge as the Trump administration ramps up removal proceedings.

coppercourier.com

Who cares, right? It's not as if she's human, after all. She's brown. Even her teddy bear is brown! Obviously she hates America, or her teddy bear would be white! Get her outta here!

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Man, Henry Cuellar gets all the luck, leaders of both parties do everything for him even though he deserves prison.

 

[Gergar12]

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-90-consecutive-life-sentences-2019-mass-shooting-walmart-el-paso-texas

It's weird he had the same illness as me, but whereas I knew guns are stupid for cities, and suburbs, and need to be tightly regulated like drones. This guy decided to shoot an entire random Walmart.

I think he should have gone to college or had a mentor like Scott Galloway or someone similar. It's weird on Reddit. I once saw someone mention here's a bunch of random people who could be mentors. I didn't know a single person on that list, and despite having friends, I am always chronically online, and they were all academics.

It's also weird that many people in the trades are insecure as they keep spamming on Tik Tok and comments sections that they make lots of money, because even though they make more now than many white collar workers, they know deep down their bodies are getting turned to shreds by their work, and say you're a plumber or electrician dealing with dirty basements, while people like Quants or even Python users deal with remote work.

I suspect if trade wages were to be reduced, the next mass shooter is going to be very insecure, like people in those trades. Also, I am surprised we haven't banned TikTok. Yes, I use it, but many job hunting tactics on it are useful. However, it sometimes drives rage bait content to you. I literally got accepted into the grad school program of my dreams in a state school, and the next day were TikTok posts about how academics are bad, elite overproduction is bad, and conservatives citing college essays from PhDs to tell you not to go to college.