I assume no one can see this post but a bee tried to pollinate this hat today https://t.co/D1Pj4T35FM
— love & barley ?????? (@loveandbarley1) July 1, 2023
BREAKING: the US economy is doing pretty damn well https://t.co/7eShgLvbcY
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 7, 2023
Wow, the Biden Regime is lying and says inflation is down to about four percent when the more reliable private sector data says it's actually much lower. https://t.co/wCsGtidoce
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 3, 2023
When Trump AND @marwilliamson Both tell you that they are going to "turn the economy around" and do a "180".. this is what they want to stop …. This is the opposite of what they want to do.. https://t.co/h8EnZAKxj1
— Hal Sparks (@HalSparks) July 6, 2023
Anyone with a better grasp of The Cyber want to comment on this ruling?
A federal judge is limiting the Biden administration's discussions with social media companies as part of a lawsuit alleging the U.S. overstepped in its efforts to persuade companies to address postings on vaccines and elections. https://t.co/UB1L8Bt8RD
— The Associated Press (@AP) July 4, 2023
A judge on Tuesday prohibited several federal agencies and officials of the Biden administration from working with social media companies about “protected speech,” a decision called “a blow to censorship” by one of the Republican officials whose lawsuit prompted the ruling.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted the injunction in response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. Their lawsuit alleged that the federal government overstepped in its efforts to convince social media companies to address postings that could result in vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or affect elections.
Doughty cited “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign. He wrote that the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’ ”…
The Justice Department is reviewing the injunction “and will evaluate its options in this case,” said a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”
The ruling listed several government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, that are prohibited by the injunction from discussions with social media companies aimed at “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”…
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit also included individuals, including conservative website owner Jim Hoft. The lawsuit accused the administration of using the possibility of favorable or unfavorable regulatory action to coerce social media platforms to squelch what it considered misinformation on masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also touched on other topics, including claims about election integrity and news stories about material on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son…
Are we still allowed to call Hoft ‘The Dumbest Man on the Internet‘?
Alternate headline: "Trump Judge Bars FBI From Warning Social Media Sites About Sex Abuse and Terrorism" https://t.co/WE4ZgqVw8C
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) July 4, 2023
On The Road – Dagaetch – World Tour Part 2 – Vietnam
Matt McIrvin
Just overheard a couple of old white guys grousing about prices at the supermarket:
“Wow, prices are out of control.”
“Yeah, and you know who to blame for THAT.”
The problem with inflation is that once it happens, it can go down to zero and people who remember prices from before the inflationary period will still be shocked at those prices and conclude that inflation isn’t fixed, unless there’s a period of deflation afterward (which you definitely don’t want).
Baud
That Dems still poll poorly in the economy is one of the biggest traversties of the last 30 years.
Realworldrj
Low low unemployment. Record job growth. Record wage increase. Lower inflation?
get ready for 17,000 breaking news segments on Fox News about caravans, blacks with hoodies in Philly, and Hunter Biden’s laptops
Baud
I don’t know what the Fifth Circuit will do, but I think the Supreme Court is still sane enough to stay the order. But it’ll take about a month.
MomSense
@Matt McIrvin:
I also think that the past is often blurry. Very few people remember accurately what the prices of various goods were year to year.
Tony Jay
Look at that inflation figure for the UK. World beating, eh?
Of course, it’s all due to lazy teachers and mooching NHS staff who haven’t had an above-inflation payrise since before The Walking Dead aired making crazy pay demands, and nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with decades of economic malpractice that has resulted in the nation’s wealth being shot through a water cannon into the gaping maws of greedy corporations and shareholder groups.
See, I said it! Can I haz Nu-Labour frontbench post now?
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: I remember what I paid for gas the other day: $3.399. The “I did that” sticker wasn’t there anymore.
NotMax
Noticed whilst gadding about in the immediate neighborhood that gasoline prices have risen by twenty cents per gallon since May, again back up to $4.79.
Baud
This is the best recession ever.
oldster
The judge’s ruling is legally nonsense, and dangerous as well.
A decade ago I knew someone who worked for a very large social media company who had previously worked at a government agency. His job at the very large social media company was to attempt to disrupt the use of their platform by al Qaeda and isis as recruiting channels. (At his previous job with the govt agency he had acquired very good skills in Iraqi flavored Arabic).
Given that he was doing anti-terrorist work, albeit as an employee of a private firm, he needed to liaise with a variety of govt agencies on a daily basis in order to learn about new threats or warn them about new threats.
Unless the judge’s 155 page decision contains a large carve-out for national security, his prohibition against govt communication with social media will be a nightmare for anti-terrorism operations.
Baud
As we learned in 2016, however, when the economy is good, bigots will pretend the economy is bad in order to justify voting for their bigotry.
Hopefully, the extremism of the GOP and young people will counteract those votes next year.
@oldster:
I believe there are carve outs.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: People generally don’t really know what they’re talking about when they refer to “the economy” at all. Sometimes it’s jobs (but if the jobs situation is too good then “no one wants to work”), sometimes it’s the stock market, sometimes it’s just the feeling that they’re paying too much for goods. Sometimes “the deficit” is used as a synonym for it.
Another Scott
Bill McBride at CalculatedRiskBlog cautions that the ADP jobs numbers and the official federal jobs numbers usually don’t agree all that well. They measure different things.
Still, the economy is doing well. Auto sales are up 20% in the last year. The economy is humming and the various federal bills passed in the last couple of years are going to have continued beneficial effects.
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@oldster
Highly recommended read — jawboning explained.
TL/DR version: blanket ruling amounts to chasing a fly with a sledgehammer.
Ken
There’s that old joke about pundits and recessions, but just in the last year they’re up to predicting twelve of the last zero recessions, which must be a record.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I thought it was pretty amazing when Trump, newly installed in office, was touting strong economic stats in front of some admiring crowd and just openly said something like “We used to say those numbers were fake but now they’re real, right?” and the crowd roared. He could just turn the numbers from fake to real by saying so, and like that, he had fixed the economy.
Kay
The booming Biden economy is the biggest miss by the media since But Her Emails and it’s just as egregious.
The income inequality gap has narrowed, African American employment is at record highs and “flyover” state manufacturing is cooking. Huge success story, almost wholly unreported.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
I know that Threads was up past 50 million signups before I went to bed (I’d forgotten to turn off the whole house fan before leaving and sucked in a bunch of hot air all day, so sleep wasn’t great). Guessing it’s probably about at 70 million now, and a lot of the big accounts that I read have migrated.
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the GameStop thing, because most of the posters seem to despise Elon Musk. Some assholes have opened accounts, but they’re not being well received or protected.
And no, I STILL haven’t turned on the AC this summer.
Baud
@NotMax: The problem is, if you don’t like the government talking to social media, you can’t carve out specific topics about which the government can “jawbone.” It’s an all or nothing thing.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: ” Old white guys at the supermarket”? Seriously, how often do old white guys go to the supermarket? That is somebody else’s job.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Matt McIrvin
@sab: Well I was there, wasn’t I?
I guess when a couple of them recognize one another among all the non-old-white-guys they have to commiserate by grousing about Joe Biden and the price of bread.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Point taken.
NotMax
@sab
Where else can you see (for free, mind you) smokin’ hot grannies squeezing their melons?
//
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Hey, don’t judge their tribal rituals.
SFAW
@sab:
Two times a week to Market Basket, usually. Sometimes others as well, depending on what’s on sale.
ETA: Pretty annoyed at the ageist bigotry us old white guys face, day-in and day-out. What have old white guys ever done to hurt anyone?
That is, outside of the fascist rulings of the ISCOTUS, fascist/racist policies of the GQP, etc.
OzarkHillbilly
@sab: I see them in Wally World all the time, usually accompanied by their wives but more than a little by themselves.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: The amusement park?
OzarkHillbilly
More good news on the green energy front:
eta: they report they will be manufacturing these in 5 years.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Walmart can be rather amusing.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: My theory about media coverage specifically is that what those people really care about when they talk about “the economy” is the stock market, and the stock market has been only so-so since Biden got in. Tech stocks kept rising until late 2021, then had a sustained bear market until around the end of 2022, then have been recovering since then. The big blue-chip stocks were more flat for most of that time. It hasn’t been a continued boom in stocks. Whereas through the Trump years, stocks were basically continuing the Obama boom aside from the one-time hit when the COVID pandemic started.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@sab:
(ahem)
I am an old white guy at the supermarket-I’ve always done the majority of that job. If I didn’t, I’d be really unhappy and suffering meals consisting primarily of nondairy chia breakfast jars along with lunch/dinner made from precisely measured tiny portions of barely seasoned baked chicken with barely seasoned greens while my dining partner yells at me about the salt shaker, having any alcohol or smoking the occasional cigar.
Yeah, I’d live longer, but why would I want to?
Jeffg166
The Dow dropped yesterday on the record new job creation. Good news for working people is always bad news for Wall Street.
I remember what prices were at the market 20 years ago. The store brand of oatmeal was $.99. Now it’s $3.49. I thought most of the price jumps in the last few years have been greed and gouging on the part of manufacturers, middlemen and distributors.
Shalimar
In my memory, it’s like a switch flipped in newsrooms with the Afghanistan withdrawal. News was positive up until that point. We were recovering from Covid together, Congress was passing landmark legislation that helped everyone, the Biden administration was getting good things done.
Then the pull-out, everyone went fuckbonkers over how awful it was to withdraw even though not a one of them had the courage to suggest an alternative occupation that lasted for decades more. Because no one wanted that, especially not the soldiers who had served there.
And the coverage of all issues has stayed that bad since then. As far as I can tell, every single thing the Biden administration had had control over in the last 2 years has gone remarkably well, but all the talk is about Republican complaints and inflation that isn’t as high as any other major country and damn he’s really old is he gonna die today.
Good fucking evil screw the hell out of them god I can’t take it most days.
Matt McIrvin
(Oh, yeah, and the stock market seemed like it was kind of cooling down around 2015-2016, which probably fueled a lot of the elite media “economy is bad, actually” buzz then. There was a rally right after Trump was elected–not when he took office, but when he was elected–that I think was maybe just because stock traders are Republicans and they felt happy for a while.)
Geminid
@MomSense: Another possible factor: inflation was exceptionally low from 2009 to 2020, and people began to see that as normal.
Ken
@OzarkHillbilly: The few times I’ve been in a Wally World, it struck me as a soulless corporation’s attempt to mimic Wall Drug.
Ken
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I am now considering the possibility that you’re a John Cole sock puppet, since that’s exactly the way he talks about his diet.
SFAW
@Jeffg166:
Curiously, most of the MSM seems not to have “discovered” that. And who can blame them? Much easier to adopt a BS talking point (“Biden’s fault!!! OMFG!!!!”) than to do some actual research and legwork.
Kay
@Shalimar:
Agree. They’re rigid, brittle people. They wrote off the Presidency that week and never revisited. They have trouble adjusting and adapting to new or different information, that which doesn’t track their predictions.
SFAW
@Kay:
You make a good/interesting point. I’m wondering how many of the “real” investigative journalists are still doing that kind of work. I’m wondering — based upon nothing more that pseudo-anecdotal “evidence,” so take it with a ton of salt — if the decline in newspapers in general has led to all the top performers saying “screw it,” thus leaving the mediocre ones to do the work.
But I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m a member of a Facebook group “Mothers in Architecture”. There’s some people in there who are sole proprietors or who work for small firms. Everyone is struggling to hire. What kills me are when people who can’t figure out why no one will accept their job offers. LOL.
Either your pay sucks, your projects suck, or your work environment sucks. Maybe all three!
Baud
@Kay: They still report on every little new thing related to Afghanistan that might be critical of Biden. I can’t think of too many other stories the media is so adamant about following up on.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I think the “Biden recovery” news had gotten boring and they were itching for a bad Biden story to start the “beleaguered administration” chapter that traditionally comes next. The Afghanistan withdrawal just happened to be the one that hit at the right time.
p.a.
Why were the old white guys shopping for food? Bidenomics kill the diners?
I’d like to occasionally save some time and order market delivery, but when I’m there and see some of the people there doing the picking, I’m not having them choose my fresh produce.
Also too, get off my
grassgreen growth that I do nothing except mow to maintain.OzarkHillbilly
@Ken: Oh god, Wall Drug. boy does that bring back memories. Stopped in there once right after Sturgis happened. It was a very… strange mix of suburban mom’s, dad’s, kids and long haired, bearded, ugly bikers, and this being 1980 or so, a whole lot of hippies too.
It was a blast for my crew, who had just wrapped up a 16 day backpacking trip in the mountains.
Baud
@Suzanne: Are they actually mothers or is Mothers short for something?
JML
@Kay: TFG’s presidency was very easy for reporters to cover and columnists to opine about. Lots of leaks, plenty of access, loads of gossip, tons of controversy. Biden’s administration is buttoned up, spends more time doing the work than chasing the cameras, and the in-fighting and back-stabbing is minimal (and probably mostly among low level staff that no one cares about).
Covering the WH right now requires understanding some things about the policies, not just the drama and personalities. Big shock that the current political reporters hate it and cover it poorly. Their media overlords are mostly right-wing douchebags, so they of course hate Biden too (corrupt elite money bullshit might actually get punished!) and will never give him fair coverage.
And yet, Joe sails on. Doing the work.
Kay
This is the best fight ever- the far Right found out RFK Jr is a huge liar:
Reading the far Right comments about him is the best- they want him to run with Trump to attract “moderates” – they seem to (now) acknowlege that Trump is unpopular.
Steeplejack
@OzarkHillbilly:
I paid $3.46 earlier this week in expensive NoVA.
SFAW
@Suzanne:
Atrios has been saying for 15-20 years that if employers want higher-quality employees, there’s a simple solution.
I sometimes refer to it as “Fuck you — pay me.” [ETA: Not original, but don’t recall where I first read it.]
Dorothy A. Winsor
Mr DAW likes grocery shopping. It allows him to hunt for bargains.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Jeffg166:
Our stock markets are a perverse measure of the economy – the metrics that brokers and analysts use are janky because our tax policy favors capital gains – guaranteeing that fictive announcements of value or strength will be used to game the market; if you’re going to favor anything, favor reinvested dividends because they’re much harder to fake.
A bonus under that setup would be that it would seriously clip the wings of the reckless VC bros.
Anyway, our current stock analyst training routine teaches that “low unemployment = overemployment”, and those employees are sopping up money that should be going to passive investment so that upper management and shareholders could see higher values.
It’s fucking perverse.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Steeplejack: Gas is over $4 here in my NW Chicago suburb, a block outside of Cook County.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The inflation rate we had during the post-COVID supply shocks was at a level that had not been seen since the early 1980s (there was a moment when it was almost as high around 1990). For a little while it was genuinely something many people had not seen in living memory.
But as I said, there’s a tendency to interpret “prices are higher than I expect” as inflation, when that’s the end product of inflation–the integral of a function that depends on inflation. But if your expectations are pre-inflationary, “prices are higher than I expect” will be a permanent thing even after the inflation is over.
Baud
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
The stock market has no way of distinguishing between production of wealth and extraction/transfer of wealth.
Scout211
Kay
@Baud:
lol
They’re full of shit as individuals. If they cared about the people of Afghanistan they would have reported on Afghanistan both prior to Biden’s withdrawal and after it- they didn’t. They even completely botched that- I was actually interested in the VISA/asylum situation. I had to patch the information together from legislation that was passed and the State Department website- they got even that “process story” wrong.
evodevo
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Evidently Stonekettle has left the Twitterverse as of Monday…he said he would stick it out, but I guess all the fuckups just got to be too much. He sells stuff online, and the data cap screwed that up…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: Do you think Montana will be able to ban TikTok? I find that astounding.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Kay:
Klanned Karenhood has made a foray onto Threads. It wasn’t quite the experience they had hoped for.
OzarkHillbilly
@Steeplejack: A few weeks back I paid $3.099. Then the summer travel demands kicked in. Either that or Biden hates me.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
No.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken:
Does this pundit joke involve rockets and the Sun?
Kay
@SFAW:
It makes me very cynical and bitter, because I have been listening to them moan about the plight of the rust belt- supposedly “ignored!” under Democrats and loved by Trump since 2016 – and now that the rust belt is booming partly due to Biden’s industrial/economic policy they no longer cover it.
What they do just isn’t a factual, real depiction of events. It’s a narrative. A “story”. Their story is Democrats “ignore!” the middle of the country and working and middle class so even though that is demonstrably not true – wasn’t true of Obama either, but it’s ESPECIALLY not true of Biden- that’s what they pump out.
People need good information to make good decisions. They don’t get it.
eclare
@sab:
Ha! Just got back from Kroger. There were lots of old Black guys there, strangely few women of any race. Except me.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
Correct.
I’ve been thinking for a while that companies trading primarily in commodities or engaged in the provision of inelastic service (healthcare) should not be listed in the indices, and traded separately. There is a good argument to be made that the doctrine of moral hazard applies here because the opportunity for rent seeking behavior is too great.
Baud
@Kay:
Agree 100%. I don’t know if the propaganda has gotten worse or I’ve come to realize how bad it is, but it’s bad.
Kay
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
I really loathe Musk and I already had an Instagram account (that is 100% gardens, trees and flowers – I view it and breathe deeply- it’s the best) so I joined Threads. I just lurk though.
Matt McIrvin
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Especially if you look at the short-term fluctuations. You’ll have these things like stocks dropping on good jobs numbers because someone is worried that the Fed is going to raise interest rates in the future. Also the old “buy on rumor, sell on news” where someone is trying to time a peak.
Baud
@Kay: Zuckerberg has made himself look like a fool, especially with the metaverse, but Facebook, Instagram, and Whats App remain incredibly popular, and Meta owns all three.
eclare
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
Yeah. My dad went to the supermarket to buy those “choose your six-pack” beer deals. One of the old Black guys this morning was stocking up on bacon for sale, maybe his wife doesn’t buy it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: I have an Instagram account that I’ve used sparely, mostly for some nice museum accounts. But I use it on my desktop, and Threads isn’t available on desktop yet. I’ll wait until they get the kinks worked out and then see.
Matt McIrvin
I think decades of stagnant real wages have led to a situation where there are a lot of existing businesses (big and small) that can only exist in a market with a lot of really cheap labor. If the situation starts to correct itself, they’re in big trouble.
(And some of the hype around AI is built on proprietors’ dreams of escaping this trap.)
evodevo
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Yep…same with Mr.Evodevo…he’ll drive 2 miles out of the way to save 50 cents on expired bakery goods LOL
OzarkHillbilly
I don’t speak emoji. I could be in trouble.
I wonder how long it will take to sort this out.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: They say rich people only care about two things; is the stock market up and is their taxes low. So the market is down and their taxes are up, that means the economy sucks. It also doesn’t help that their commercial real-estate investments are in the trash because the lazy peons are working from home and shopping on line.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Right-wing economists used to sing the praises of the “creative destruction” that occurs in a capitalist economy.
Steeplejack
@p.a.:
I had to quit going to my iconic, folksy diner for my usual artery-clogging breakfast because the place got jammed with goddamn reporters wanting to get my take on the events of the day and why they were bad for Joe Biden. Sometimes I couldn’t even get a seat! So now I shop at the grocery and eat my cold cereal at home. Damn it.
Nelle
@sab: My husband haunts the supermarkets now that he has retired. Always looking for a good bargain on something. I’m trying to ignore the phenomenon.
Edit – ah, I see others have weighed in. And sometimes, husband asks, are Jews “white guys”?
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: Most financial reporting is like a game of Mad Libs; “__(asset)__ went __(up/down)__ today on news of __(random event)__”.
I once toyed with making a stock-trading game on those principles, where players would play sets of cards for the three blanks to “move the market”, then could buy or sell assets. “I play ‘Ford Motor went up 10 points on news of a new Pope’, and now I’ll sell my shares of Ford…”
John S.
@Ken:
Ah yes, the other main attraction in South Dakota.
When we moved last year, we drove through South Dakota on our way west. Every single mile of the drive through SD we saw all these quirky signs about Wall Drug. Being from Florida, we had no clue WTF it was. It was kind of funny when we finally passed it and found out what Wall Drug actually was.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Are you saying that is what they think they are doing with every recession?
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@eclare: Yup – those guys are smart.
Otherwise, abominations like turkey bacon walk through the door.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: Another aspect of that (as many have noted) is that decades of low interest rates have created a lot of companies, including large chunks of tech and their venture capital investors, that can only succeed in that environment. The Fed’s interest rate hikes have shown us which companies, as Warren Buffett put it, are swimming naked.
Suzanne
@Baud: Actually moms. Lots of discussions about workplace flexibility and balancing parenting demands with an intense career path. Some of my personal friends are there. It’s actually a nice, supportive group.
But the people who can’t hire blow my mind. Like…. all of us know what it’s like to compete for work. We’ve been competing for our whole educational and professional lives (many projects are awarded after competitive interviews and designs). And they totally forget that you have to compete for employees. It’s a market like any other. Architects and designers typically want to work on high-profile projects with large budgets, and big firms can offer that. So if your small-firm job offer is equal to that of a big firm, you’re not going to get that employee. Your offer has to be better in some way. You have to differentiate.
I tried pointing this out. I will not attempt again.
SFAW
@Kay:
I don’t disagree, but I wonder whether they’d be able to assess that (mythical) good information were they to see/hear it. If (almost) all they consume if Fox, then their critical-thinking skills are probably minimal or non-existent.
On the other hand, it’s not clear that persons with critical-thinking skills would watch Fox, other than to remedy their hypotension.
Ken
@Baud: “Let the chips fall where they may” isn’t as much fun when you’re the chips.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: I think they mostly use it in any circumstance when workers are hurt, to make it seem like it’s actually a good thing so there shouldn’t be any public policies to deal with the problem.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Just absurd 😡
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: About a year ago, my wife saw an op-ed by the CEO of a call-center firm who was basically wishing for the next recession to start already so it could knock some sense into the entitled Millennial and GenZ brats who wanted decent pay for work. He was obviously salivating over the prospect of high unemployment and cheap cheap workers.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Unreported because they can’t BOTH SIDES it, and it would be an unqualified success for the Biden Administration
Jeffro
I’d settle for one, JUST ONE, article about the low low price of eggs these days.
Steeplejack
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
There are some anomalies here. I passed a station that was right off Route 66 before you cross the Potomac into D.C., and gas was $3.99 there. Maybe clipping the tourists.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t really care about the CEOs. What I want to see next year is the workers appreciating what Biden and the Dems have done.
Baud
@Jeffro: BABY FORMULA!!!
Jeffro
Mrs Fro, amateur econ pundit, has predicted that there’ll be a recession “any day now” for probably the last oh fifteen, twenty years or so. =)
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@SFAW: The first time I encountered that phrasing was in the movie Goodfellas, as in: “Business went bad? Fuck you, pay me. Had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. The place got hit by lightning? Fuck you, pay me.”
Describing the perils of dealing with a mobbed-up loan shark, and the sequence ended with the business being bought out by the mob for pennies on the dollar and burned to the ground for the insurance payout.
Every time I hear the sentiment phrased like that, it gives me an uneasy feeling.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Things like the supremacy of the open market and the sanctity of contract go out the window when workers start using these things to bite them.
Kay
@rikyrah:
Some really interesting things have happened. The income inequality gap shrinking is one of them, another is the shrinking gap between AA employment and white employment – both AA AND white employment are high- a more equitable economy. The worker leverage story is interesting- people quit jobs they hated and moved to jobs they liked more. People retired “early” – earlier than they might have in a worse economy, which benefitted young people.
But they decided to focus exclusively on inflation, all of them, because they’re narrow, brittle and unimaginative people who operate in a herd.
Jeffro
This is a VERY good theory. It’s too much work looking at & explaining other economic indicators, talking to people who are working/getting raises/getting overtime, etc etc. Far easier for reporters to look at the DJIA and go “meh economy”.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: That’s fundamentally why libertarianism is a doomed theory.
mrmoshpotato
Did someone say Jawbone?
NotMax
@Ozark Hillbilly
Sez you.
:)
mrmoshpotato
@Matt McIrvin:
CHOMP! Mmmmmm rich ass tartare.
Rob in CT
Nifty.
Of course, Matt’s right that a lot of people will not consider inflation to have been “fixed” unless prices actually fall (deflation, which means a recession, which they would also scream about), so they will not be satisfied by reduced inflation.
A lot of people, myself included, had adjusted to a low-inflation (and low growth!) environment post-’08 financial panic.
My hope is that despite the crappiness of the MSM, the lying shitstains in RW media, and all that, eventually enough people will get it through their heads that things are actually pretty damn ok.
There is a “hack gap” here, where wingers will flip on a dime and make laughable claims (Best Economy Ever!!!!!) and liberals aren’t like that. It’s a both a strength and a weakness: we’re reality-based, but we’re bad cheerleaders. Ah well.
Soprano2
*Work-related rant* Just spent 45 minutes going through a bunch of credit card expense reports looking for receipts for materials that hadn’t been turned in. The inventory is a total clusterfuck this year because of a brain-dead decision by management that our crews should install some new sewer (something we just don’t do!) rather than bid it out to a contractor. Two months and who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars later, they hired a contractor to actually do the damn job, because the fucking engineer on the job tested for bedrock way down in the holler rather than up where the actual sewer was being installed, so instead of the rock being 10 feet down, it was 3 feet down! Meanwhile, I have a two-month thick pile of papers for the work that I cannot enter into the computer yet, that used a whole bunch of materials that I have to account for in the fiscal year end inventory. It is a total FUBAR. For the first time ever I’m just going to go with what my co-worker counted as what we have, because it’s too hard to figure out what was used in a job I can’t yet enter into the computer *work-related rant over* I’m just beyond frustrated by the whole situation, we never should have tried to do this in the first place. They always think we can do stuff cheaper, but in this case WE CAN’T!!! It’s probably going to cost over $100,000 to install three sewer lines and two manholes – should have been about half that.
eclare
I have never understood why people remember gas prices so much and pay attention to them. If you have a long commute, sure, but my parents, retired, would absolutely obsess over gas prices, telling me how cheap a station was that was out of my way. One of my retired aunts writes down what she pays every time she fills up.
Even when I had a long commute, my attitude was it is what it is. If food prices go up, maybe I change what I buy. There is no substitute for gas.
Jeffro
@Baud: yeah, where’d THAT story go?
or our blessed “supply chain issues” that were all Biden’s fault?
>(
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: I still hear grousing about how gas was so much cheaper in spring/summer 2020, why can’t that come back! I always say “Do you want that period of Covid to come back too?” I can’t believe people can’t remember why gas was so cheap in the first place! Plus, I didn’t make you buy that monster truck when you live 30 miles from your workplace.
Rob in CT
@eclare: well, the prices are very visible, all over, and it’s something most of us buy frequently.
NotMax
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Cigars?
When a dime was enuf.
;)
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Hey! She shops at my Wally world!
eta “Ah lahks the Dollar Store, you don havta dress up or anything like ya do at WalMart.”
Jeffro
@Kay:
It’s a great point.
It reminds me of the Fed and using rate hikes over and over to try and
put people out of workdecrease inflation: were there no other “tools” in the nation’s toolbox? Maybe higher taxes on corporate profits next time?Same thing with reporting (as you noted): did anyone want to go out and talk to those early retirees? Talk to folks getting big raises? Maybe do a feature on ‘Overtime Pay: Does It Rock or Does it RAWK???’ ?
Soprano2
@MomSense: I keep seeing “price drop” signs in WalMart where they’re dropping the price of things a dollar or more! No one talks about that, but it’s happening.
Kay
I can’t take the WH cocaine scandal seriously. Come on. It’s clownish. I just refuse to treat this as if it’s important.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I mean, libertarians always seem to be for right-to-work laws, hate unions and consider union rules as the one non-governmental form of restriction they recognize as oppression… but that’s all about freedom of contract, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be their favorite thing! They want the big bad government to restrict what you can do with a contract?
Anyway
@Jeffro:
Ha! I did mention the low price of eggs at the 4th of July cookout … crickets…
eclare
@Rob in CT:
I guess I just don’t notice. Since the signs are all over, maybe they just blend into the background? I have no idea what gas prices are in Memphis. None. When I need to fill up, I pull into a station and fill the tank.
Manyakitty
@Matt McIrvin: I generally start by asking those people about their views on immigration. They can’t run away from me fast enough. 😀
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: One of the right-wing talking points in the 2012 election cycle was that Obama had made gas prices go way up relative to the floor they hit at the bottom of the 2008 economic crash. Yeah, the whole world economy had just collapsed so people weren’t buying gasoline, give me some more of that!
eclare
@Soprano2:
Sigh. I have worked at companies where if they had just followed the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule we would have saved millions of dollars. Mainly spent on useless software.
Kay
Los Angeles Times.
Jeffro
Well hey – one person, at least, is trying to get the word out about the real American economy
Ms. Rubin, take it away:
Jeffro
(let’s try this again with fewer links)
At least one pundit gets it: there’s far too little good reporting on this great economy
Take it away, Ms. Rubin:
NotMax
@Anyway
And yet only yesterday the fill-in host on MSNBC’s 11th Hour program said the price of eggs when she went to the market this week was astronomically high.
Le sigh.
Soprano2
@Kay: But none of that affected the D.C/New York elite, so of course they have to write the 500th story about “cancellation” at elite universities instead. /s/s/s/s/s
Rob in CT
Matt – the very same people will defend Donnie’s deal with the Saudis in 2020 to cut production & prop up prices.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: I saw a pickup last night with a “fuck Biden” sticker in the window. These are the same people who used to bemoan the “coarsening of the culture” – now they ride around in vehicles with the word “fuck” on them and wear T-shirts with the same.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Suzanne: My daughter is having this issue, she took a new job last year, because her previous job would not allow any work from home and she needed a little flexibility , when your job will not let you start a little early and work a little late so you can take your baby to physical therapy, it’s time to think about looking for a new job. She like the new job at first but then found that after several people left the company, they are just piling all their work on her, expecting more mandatory overtime, a lot more field work and no compensation for the increased responsibilities.
Geminid
@Scout211: Boebert almost talked herself out of a safe, R+8 seat.
Candidate quality typically counts less than a district’s demographics, but Frisch’s razor-thin loss last year year shows a limiting case for that dynamic.
Ken
That, and its advocates are all libertarians.
OzarkHillbilly
I’m not about to spend a half hour driving around town looking for the cheapest gas.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I had to mute my Facebook friend who won’t stop posting multiple times a day about Biden cruelly denying that Hunter’s child is his granddaughter (which, I think, is right-wing media drawing a line between the paternity result and language on the White House website about the number of grandchildren Biden has). To her, this is the President abusing a child and that’s the biggest story in the universe to her.
JaneE
How does the judge tell social media companies they cannot enforce their terms of service? Telling them about violations of their service agreements about misinformation sounds like a 1st amendment right. Twitter, may not care, but has everyone else said anything goes?
Rob in CT
@Soprano2:
People a few houses down the road from me had a large
“Trump 2020, No More Bullshit” sign up during the last election (and for some time after).
Ultimately, this resulted in me having to explain it to my then-10 year old daughter. Were the situation reversed, it would play on a loop on Fox.
That said, it was a great convo, and resulted in a debate about whether Donnie from Queens or Dick Nixon was a bigger liar. The meat of it, though, was discussing what “bullshit” means to these people.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@NotMax: Did super smart news person not realize avian influenza required the culling of something on the order of 43 million chickens last year? Many of them the laying flocks?
The price of eggs is Not a good gauge of the economy…
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Having to throw on the tux, the opera cape and the Birkenstocks when shopping at Whole Foods gets to be a real chore.
//
Rob in CT
@Matt McIrvin: Wait until your friend finds about Donald Trump!
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: The maid usually does her shopping. Or is it the nanny?
NotMax
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Too many have their set in stone narrative and they’re going to keep pimping it, circumstances be damned.
Soprano2
@Kay: I still think they are mad because they lost their easy overseas story – go to Afghanistan, visit with the troops for a few days, interview a couple of locals, that kind of stuff. They were used to doing that, and Biden took it away from them. I might be completely wrong, but you’re correct that for some reason they got really angry with the Biden administration over that, and have stayed that way ever since.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s at least sort of “scandalous” – this is just the inept, clownish and probably wingnut infested Secret Service fucking up again. Since they fuck up massively about every 3 months it’s not even “news”. They’re bad at security. They almost got the Obamas killed in three separate incidents. They once allowed a lobbyist carrying a gun to get on an elevator with Obama. WTF? Were they TRYING to kill him?
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: The stock market seems to be mostly about the feelings of a few high-level traders. It doesn’t seem to be that much about the actual value of things. I ask my husband every day “Were they happy or sad today?” based on how our E-Trade account looks.
NotMax
OzarkHillbilly
“That’s not a maid, that’s a domicile assistant.”
//
Soprano2
@Jeffro: Oh, and have you noticed that the baby formula shortage is over? No reporting about that at all that I can find.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I don’t think anyone could have “managed” that withdrawal better. It was always going to be chaotic and tragic. The whole “management” criticism was just cover because media got caught out war cheerleading. They went to “management” of the withdrawal only after they were criticized for being insanely angry at the ending of the war.
rikyrah
Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) tweeted at 7:36 AM on Thu, Jul 06, 2023:
Wage growth is outstripping inflation month over month. Inflation still an issue but it is leveling off quite well as job growth continues.
(https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1676933096602468357?t=J0abgxJg3qEzR8HuLQUIhw&s=03)
rikyrah
CLAP CLAP CLAP
Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) tweeted at 7:26 AM on Thu, Jul 06, 2023:
HOLY Crap! The June Jobs report is a complete blowout:
– Private sector jobs jumped by 497,000
– Analysts were expecting just 220,000 added jobs
– Annual pay rose at a 6.4% rate in America
People keep trying to attack Bidenomics, but the economy is incredibly strong and… https://t.co/dF5FpeEucu
(https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1676930566828990464?t=NNCEXmOqNbsqg3_i2XlCDA&s=03)
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: At least they’re saying “fuck Biden” out in the open instead of this coy “let’s go Brandon” stuff–tee hee, I said a naughty but didn’t use any bad words!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: I hope the Republican convention has that as it’s slogan.
Matt McIrvin
The interesting thing about the labor situation is that the “Great Resignation” is clearly over, too–labor force participation is shooting up at a ferocious rate; it just hasn’t quite passed the pre-COVID level yet, though I think it has passed the post-Great-Recession floor around 2015. There’s this inability to distinguish between temporary shocks and permanent situations.
A lot of Boomers finally retired when COVID hit, and that was part of the labor shock, though in practice it seems like the labor force participation rate is mostly driven by stuff that happens at the other end–young people choosing to get their first real job now or to wait a while.
topclimber
@Soprano2: Well, they tried subtlety with Let’s Go Brandon and look what dark fate that brought them.
Soprano2
Oh, and I forgot about the best news from yesterday – hubby tested negative for Covid! Yay, we’re both over it, and both had mild cases. Now I have to figure out how long it is until we can get the latest booster. Might have to wait for fall.
Geminid
@rikyrah: Krassenstein may have jumped the gun a litttle. The Labor Department figures released this morning showed a jobs added total in the low 200,000s.
That is still not a bad number, and might be revised upward later. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.6%, I believe.
Baud
@Geminid: So where did the other numbers come from? Did someone just make it up?
Amir Khalid
Some news from Malaysia: PM Anwar Ibrahim will have an investment meeting next week with Elon Himself. Not sure if this news is good or bad.
rikyrah
@Soprano2:
YEAH!!!
Geminid
@Baud: There is a major private payroll company- ADP?- that publishes its own estimates. They usually conform fairly well to the Labor Department reports.
topclimber
ADP which uses a different metric than Labor Department. They are often different but mostly move in the same direction.
Baud
@Geminid:
@topclimber:
Thanks.
lowtechcyclist
@Steeplejack:
Or maybe just high rents. Property in Rosslyn has to be pretty expensive.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I genuinely think there are too many of them chasing the same story. That’s why they blow up these tiny blips and turn them into “worrying trends” (no one wants to work, etc.)
But they could solve that problem. Cover something else– something no one else is covering. So if the herd is covering “cancel culture” (as another example of a hugely inflated “problem”) make a conscious decision NOT to follow that and instead cover, oh, I don’t know- the huge public college systems that most people attend?
Kirk
@SFAW: this presentation is older than Goodfellas, and it’s great advice.
NotMax
Weird.
Wednesday night, toe next to the big one on one foot was screaming triple red alert. Felt as if I’d mashed it or maybe broken it. Hobbling around the house with gritted teeth, every tortured step aggravating.
Thursday, all gone.
Ascribing it to some type of insect bite while outside, in sandals, running some local errands.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
You should send Ibrahim information about which conspiracy and cancel culture memes to push to impress Musk.
Shalimar
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I do all of our grocery shopping for that reason. I watch all the sales brochures, know what pantry items eventually will be deep discounted and which won’t be, the cheapest places to find everything, and where you can find good deals on higher quality items and when it is better to settle for house brands. It bothers me when other family members shop, because i can count in my head how much money they wasted.
Soprano2
@topclimber: True, but I love pointing out they hypocrisy of the “you dirty hippies want me to have to explain bad words to my young, innocent child” people driving around with the word “fuck” plastered on their vehicle. I posted on a message board a long time ago with a conservative who had a schtick of posting “the coarsening of America” threads, which were always about how liberals were deliberately making our culture nastier. He probably has a “fuck Biden” T-shirt now! He lived in Naples, FL. LOL
topclimber
@Kay: Has anyone gone to the diners (bars more likely) where journalists hang out to find out if it is they or their editors who insist on the same old crapola?
geg6
@OzarkHillbilly:
Had to go there during my lunch hour the other day because that’s where Lovey’s insulin prescription is (cheapest insulin price around). It was total freak show.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: I read something about that the other day in a semi-respectable media outlet — Vanity Fair maybe? It’s an odd business. The kid in question’s mother’s family are ass-deep in far-right politics and culture. There are photos of the “other” grandpa hunting with Trump Jr., etc.
I’m paranoid, so I did wonder if it was just a coincidence that the baby mama traveled from her family’s Deep South redoubt to DC and just so happened to hook up with Hunter Biden. I mean probably it was happenstance? IIRC, Joe Biden wasn’t even running for president at the time.
But the whole thing worked out pretty well for the baby mama since she was collecting $20K per month in child support, and now the wingnut media is having a field day with the story.
Soprano2
@Kay: Isn’t it funny how reporters act as if they have no agency at all? They all wring their hands and act like they are forced to cover stories. Somehow, they are all forced to talk about the same thing. It’s pretty pathetic.
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: I buy gas at BJ’s–that’s most of what I use the membership for these days, though I was using it as a source for grocery delivery when we were COVID hermits.
The thing I notice is that while truly gigantic SUVs and pickups are certainly common everywhere, among the people who buy gas at BJ’s it’s maybe 80% of the clientele. Escalades, Expeditions, F-150s and F-350s. To the point that on busy days it can be difficult to even get to the further pumps because it doesn’t take very many of these land leviathans to completely jam up the queue area. They have giant gas tanks and they get 15-20 MPG on a good day so you’re going to be pumping gas a lot. I can see that that choice would make you really price-conscious about gasoline.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Negative is a positive.
Personally, have received a booster, like clockwork, every six months.
Rob in CT
@Geminid:
I may be mixing him up w/someone else, but isn’t Krassenstein unreliable in general?
Anyway, being off by that much should put a dent in his credibility.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: Maybe Musk is considering putting a Tesla plant in Malaysia. Is anyone producing vehicles there now?
On a different subject, did May’s Turkish elections get much attention in Malaysian media?
They got more attention here than usual, probably because of the prospect of an Erdogan loss. He is a much maligned figure in the West, and people really got their hopes up.
Jeffro
I think there were a LOT of contractors (and possibly some DoD folks?) making a lot of money off of the Forever War over there, and they weren’t happy about losing that gravy train. And surely some of DoD’s brass wanted to keep fighting rather than have a painful, public withdrawal (regardless of of how necessary it was).
Take all of those folks and point them & their complaints at our stenographer media, and yeah, the negative coverage gets intense.
Baud
@Soprano2:
My favorite thing is when they flog a story and then opine how the (Dem) official or candidate are unable make this story go away.
rikyrah
@Jeffro:
That’s too analytical, and the story would have a positive spin for the Biden Administration.
I can’t stress this enough.
If they can’t BOTH SIDES it, then they ignore it completely.
Sure Lurkalot
@Matt McIrvin:
Like there are no bad or unintended consequences in such economic conditions. How well does his call center do when the consumer base shrinks and his clients no longer need his services?
rikyrah
@NotMax:
it was EGGS EGGS EGGS..
Until the prices came back to normal..now, nothing.
Remember when it was BABY FORMULA BABY FORMULA BABY FORMULA…
Then, once the Biden Administration resolved the issue..
you never heard about it again.
Kay
@topclimber:
I don’t know but my middle son had a funny story about NPR reporters. This was during the Syrian refugee panic (so +/- 1000 panics ago). Toledo has a thriving “little Syria” in the North end – they took in refugees- and that area also has some sort of rough bars where my middle son sometimes goes. So he was in the North end Little Syria bar with his fellow electricians and the NPR reporters came in to ask them about the Syrian refugees (‘how much do you hate and fear them?”) and one of my son’s friends said “we don’t want to talk about Syrian refugees- we want to talk about the bedbug problem” and this became a joke and they all refused to talk about anything other than “bedbugs in Toledo- real crisis!” and the reporters got mad and left.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Was in Naples, Florida circa 1962.
Poster image for WASP country club culture central. More white leather belts than you could shake a stick at.
Geminid
@Rob in CT: There are several Krassensteins who’ve made news. I think there were a couple of Krassenstien brothers who were discredited in some respects a couple years ago.
This Krassenstein was reporting real news, but maybe hyped it a little too much.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax:
Here they won’t give you one if you’ve had the bivalent shot already, except maybe in exceptional circumstances. I assume there will be new guidance when some XBB-tailored booster comes out in the fall, and I’ll get it then.
rikyrah
@Kay:
But Kay, that would require them to actually research and WORK. It’s far easier to follow the group.
They resent 46 and his Administration, because they actually have to work and understand the policies that this Administration is working on.
Far easier when they were stenographers who only had to hang out on twitter during the Dolt45 years to see what that clown was doing.
rikyrah
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I am fascinated that people are in actual grocery stores.
The only thing that I miss about grocery stores is picking out the produce. And, now that farmer’s markets are back, I can pick produce there out in the open air.
I order groceries and have them delivered.
Rob in CT
@Kay:
Well, that’s both funny and depressing.
Rob in CT
@Geminid:
The number was off by more than 2x. Where did he get the almost 500k number from?
NotMax
@rikyrah
Twitterati.
efgoldman ’em.
//
geg6
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Wow. We’re at $3.59 here. And we usually have some of the higher prices because PA has very high fuel taxes.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
Huh. That is interesting.
John S.
The MSM must have their narrative!
rikyrah
@geg6:
Bought gas yesterday for $3.90
Jeffro
I agree…and I think that’s what Rubin was saying here? The snooze media skips the positive impact/accomplishments, and goes straight to the horse race.
“Biden policy X results in Y additional
good-paying* jobs. When asked to comment, a Republican official threw up and a Democratic official smiled. So…opinions differ.”*they would never, ever, drill down to this level and note the positive impact…so just ‘jobs’ it is…
Anyway, opinions will ALWAYS differ and we know that’s not ‘reporting’.
Spanky
@Kay:
I’m convinced some of them were.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Grocery delivery from the regular stores was so slammed during the COVID shutdowns that I couldn’t even use it then. Peapod is basically the only player in this area.
So I used a combination of delivery from BJ’s and curbside pickup at Target, but the selection of stuff you could get that way was limited in odd and inconvenient ways.
I went back to in-person grocery shopping as soon as I felt it wasn’t completely foolhardy. One thing that has changed permanently is that we’re way more willing to order delivery from restaurants than we used to be (expensive but the convenience is seductive).
eclare
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh I totally get that. Or for anyone with a long commute. I don’t get people who don’t drive a lot who keep track of it. Prob just one of my quirks.
JCJ
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: A while ago there was a great “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip where Rat is drinking beer and eating pizza. Pig tells him eating like that will take 10 years off of his life. Rat replies you mean 10 years where I will be all alone with everything hurting all the time? The next panel Pig is also eating pizza and drinking beer.
Alison Rose
I’m confused. The NYT says “U.S. employers added 209,000 jobs in June” and said it “represented a continued cooling of the labor market”. Is that number counting something different than the 497,000 in this post and that I’m seeing in other articles
Eta from CNBC:
Kay
@Spanky:
The WaPo reported on the series of “mishaps” with the Obamas – one where the intruder reached the stairs to the residence, where the girls were, and Michelle Obama was (reportedly) furious. I don’t blame her. It’s four people. They couldn’t adequately protect four people?
Matt McIrvin
@John S.: If there’s not a story otherwise, they can make it all about the expectations game and whether or not the announcement beat the spread.
Another Scott
@Alison Rose: The 497,000 number is from ADP. Those numbers usually don’t agree with the official numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as they measure different things.
CalculatedRiskBlog on the BLS numbers today.
CalcluatedRiskBlog on ADP numbers yesterday.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Rob in CT: See #160, 161
Edit: and #204
Chief Oshkosh
@OzarkHillbilly: I very much disagree with Judge Timmeh. If two parties are agreeing to a contract, they should very clearly state: “I agree to this contract” and somehow link that statement to the contract itself.
Don’t agree? Think about the number of Trump-like “business people” there are. Trump would LOVE to be able to say that an emoji means just what he wants it to mean.
“When I use an emoji,’ Humpty Trumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Trumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
NotMax
@Kay
Put in mind of the two guys in crisp white shirts with rolled up sleeves and dress slacks, pens in breast pockets, who marched in and carried out a canoe from Abercombie & Fitch when it was a hoity-toity sportsmen emporium.
If you look like and project an air you belong, you’re essentially invisible.
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
It’s always this way, as if the policies themselves didn’t matter, and they were important only insofar as they affected the political fortunes of the President and the two parties. But good for Ms. Rubin for pointing it out.
I concur with the theory that it wouldn’t be quite this bad if our national media weren’t so overcompensated that the policies don’t affect them or anyone they know personally.
I wouldn’t mind having 15-20% of their coverage being about the who’s-up, who’s-down nonsense, if the remaining 80-85% was about the actual policies and their effects. But the coverage is overwhelmingly this damned meta shit.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
Neither am I, but I notice which gas stations of those I frequently drive by usually have lower prices than others. If the needle’s not on ‘E’ and I’m gonna be passing a consistently cheaper station in the next day or so, I’ll wait.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
MSM has forever been more than eager to trample over their own grandmothers while wearing golf shoes to cover politics over policy.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: The Guardian story mentions the degradation over time issues. It’s a big problem, but progress is being made.
Energy.gov:
Organic solar cells are also an area getting a lot of interest – organic chemistry is amazing and a huge, huge playground compared to the relatively small number of inorganic semiconductors.
Exciting times.
Cheers,
Scott.
Belafon
@Matt McIrvin: Tell them that the price of gas is a dollar lower than a year ago, and around the price at the end of the Trump administration and they won’t believe you.
Kathleen
@Kay: That would require actual work and effort to figure out how to explain what they’ve researched.
I have a theory about why reporters and others went ballistic about Afghanistan but it’s really nasty so I will bite my keyboard in the interest of civility.
Jeffg166
@Soprano2: Working in advertising there was never time to do it right but there was always time to do it twice.
Alison Rose
@Another Scott: Huh. I don’t usually pay very close attention to these reports. Is the difference usually this vast?
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Since they started putting fuel pumps inside the gas tanks, using the liquid to provide cooling for them, I’ve followed the advice that ¼ tank is the new E.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Yeah, basically that. Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning:
Scout211
Kari Lake is in the news again. This gossipy article in Jezebel is fun.
Donald Trump Kind of Hates That His Roommate, Kari Lake, Is a ‘Spotlight Hound’
Steeplejack
@Kathleen:
Okay, what’s your theory?
(Pro tip: If you want to keep something secret, don’t tell everybody that you’ve got a secret!)
Another Scott
@John S.: There’s lots of interesting stuff in South Dakota. We enjoyed the Mammoth Site.
I didn’t understand Wall Drug either – especially the name – until we went there (I bought a walking stick there to help with a painful tight knee). Looking at the area, one quickly understands where the name “Wall” came from.
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
@Jeffro: I hadn’t thought about that, the contractors who lost business probably influenced the press too.
rikyrah
@Kathleen:
This is BJ. I would love to hear your theory.
New Deal democrat
@lowtechcyclist: Don’t get too overexcited. Private sector employment only increased 149,000 in June, the lowest since December 2020. The remaining 60,000 jobs were in government, chiefly education. This isn’t objectively “bad,” but it isn’t great either.
And the recent increase in initial jobless claims is a pretty good leading indicator (with a 50+ year history) that the unemployment rate is going to increase in the next few months.
Not recessionary, but not “Huzzah!” Either
Uncle Cosmo
@sab: Well, this old guy goes to the supermarket regularly – it’s that, pay restaurant prices, or starve.
FTR the other day I walked into the local nearly-within-walking-distance Lidl supermarket and discovered that standard white bread, $0.50 a loaf since they opened about a year ago, is now $1.29. “Loss leader” no more, I guess.
(They’re a bunch of con artists anyway, offering big discounts in big bold lettering and then taking them back in the fine print that most of their clientele can’t read or understand. I have to check every receipt and at least half the time they’ve overcharged me or failed to include the advertised discount.
(I wonder how much of their profit margin comes from hoodwinking their customers into thinking they’re getting a bargain when they aren’t. If it isn’t substantial, why do it? If it is, they should IMHO sell their US stores to ALDI [which AFAICT doesn’t play those deceptive games] and swim back to Germany.)
Ken
@NotMax: Are you sure you’re not thinking of Fitzwilly?
Rob in CT
@Scout211:
The world is truly made for those who lack any self-awareness.
eclare
@Steeplejack:
Isn’t that in essence the Barbra Streisand effect?
Cheryl from Maryland
@eclare: The seventies (50 years) ago are still the historical benchmark for gas prices. I, a child of the 70s, am happy when gasoline is under $4.00, as I consider it irrational that the price would be the same as when I was a teen. Nothing else is.
Manyakitty
@Kay: the media morons are thrilled to find the slightest whiff of a scandal. JFC.
NotMax
@Ken
Story predates that Dick van Dyke vehicle.
SFAW
@Kirk:
Tough for it to be older than Goodfellas, since he references it at the start of his talk.
Still good, of course.
Eolirin
@Baud: You can if you define protected speech narrowly.
SFAW
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Yes, I think that’s probably where I first heard it, but I’ve heard it expressed in non-mob venues (such as blogs), which may be what came to mind.
Uncle Cosmo
@OzarkHillbilly: My understanding (limited as it might be) is that “perovskite” refers not to a single compound (or mineral) but to a whole class of them with the same basic structure, but varying elements in the corresponding lattice locations. Depending upon the exact composition, each perovskite absorbs light in somewhat different ranges of the spectrum.
In which case it is at least possible that solar-cell efficiency might be increased even further with two or more perovskite layers added to the silicon layer. And/or mounting the cells atop a substrate with water lines that could absorb any residual heat and introduce it to the building’s hot water system.
No doubt scientists are working all angles here. Exciting times ahead!
trollhattan
@Scout211: Which IMHO gets at why he chose Pence. Yeah, Pence propped up his bona fides with fundys but he importantly makes Trump seem like a sparkling wit by comparison, and that’s just how a “king” wants things.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: Around here (according to GasBuddy) it was under $3 a gallon when Biden came in and is at about $3.50 now, so that’s still a net rise. Not a ruinous one. The peak price in between was about $5.
Soprano2
@Kathleen: No, you should share!!
Soprano2
@Jeffg166: Yep, that’s basically what happened. Plus the opportunity cost of tying up one of our repair crews for 2 months in a futile attempt to break through several feet of rock with too-small equipment for the job. It was an extremely poor decision that I hope the new boss uses as a learning experience. He kept asking about the expense of it, and I kept telling him I couldn’t give him a number until they were done. He’s going to be shocked, because it’s going to be so much higher than they thought. That’s what happens when you have to pay a contractor over $40,000 to complete the job, when you could have bid it for that in the first place! Can you tell, I am so pissed. I can’t wait to spend several hours entering all that stuff into the database.
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m old enough to remember at least a couple of boom-bust cycles vis-a-vis hiring. It always annoys the crap out of me when employers whine about employees asking for whatever perqs they can get — and usually getting them — when the prospective employees have the upper hand. I know that the employers will do far worse harm to employees (or prospective employees) during downturns than employees could ever do to employers.
One “example” I used to use: Employer X wants an employee with skills A through Z; Prospect has skills A through Y, but not Z: “Sorry but you’re not qualified.” Maybe an exaggeration, maybe not.
Matt McIrvin
@Cheryl from Maryland: In inflation-adjusted dollars gas prices are below where we were in the late 70s; not in unadjusted dollars. The big shock then was that they went through the $1/gallon barrier.
But what people do forget is the time when gas was above $4/gallon during George W. Bush’s second term. It dropped after that because the economy collapsed.
Baud
@SFAW:
SiubhanDuinne, Mob Enforcer, takes issue with this description.
Uncle Cosmo
Dingdingdingding, we have a
winnerloser! Use an uptick in costs to justify a price hike 3-4 times as high.Case in point, DollarTree stores, which all closed one day about 18 months ago and reopened the next day with everything that was a dollar repriced at $1.25. Big FUCKYOU to their customers! (But did they change the signs to Dollar-And-A-QuarterTree? Hell no! BASTARDS!)
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
But how fucking hard is that??? I mean, I know more about this shit than they seem to (as best as I can tell, anyway), and it’s (theoretically) their day job. And it’s most certainly not mine.
Wish they’d just fire all the reporters on bloated six-figure salaries, and hire as many people at $75K as that frees up the money for. (Bet there’s lots of good reporters available who used to be working for local papers that have gone bust.) Have them cover the policies and their effects, and I bet you could get some good stories.
Alison Rose
@Uncle Cosmo: DollarishTree
Rob in CT
@lowtechcyclist:
WaPo ditched Radley Balko. Pretty clearly they don’t want investigative journalism.
lowtechcyclist
@Uncle Cosmo:
Is there a missing /s tag here?
eclare
@SFAW:
It’s not an exaggeration. I finally was offered a job, but not before the hiring manager ruefully shook her head and told me the previous employee had twelve years of specific industry experience.
rikyrah
Lowdown, no-good muthaphuckas
CPD investigating claims of officer or officers having sexual relations with migrants housed in West Side police station
By Sam Charles
Chicago Tribune
•
Jul 06, 2023 at 8:50 pm
The Chicago Police Department acknowledged an internal investigation Thursday into allegations that an officer or officers assigned to a West Side patrol district engaged in sexual relations with migrants who were living in a police station.
The department said in an email late Thursday that the bureau of internal affairs, as well as the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, had opened an investigation, but a department spokesperson did not address questions about when the investigation began or if any officers were stripped of their police powers.
A representative for COPA did not respond to an inquiry Thursday night.
The Police Department said the allegations concern an officer or officers assigned to the Ogden District, which covers the Little Village and Lawndale neighborhoods on the West Side.
Few details were available late Thursday about the scope of the investigation. Also a focus was whether some of the migrants allegedly involved in the matter were minors, sources with knowledge of the internal review said.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-cpd-migrants-investigation-20230707-fzwvhhjizfggfjxcg62fxqtilq-story.html?lctg=F5D37479F5E0448F5572B5347B&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.chicagotribune.com%2fnews%2fcriminal-justice%2fct-cpd-migrants-investigation-20230707-fzwvhhjizfggfjxcg62fxqtilq-story.html&utm_campaign=CT-Breaking-News&utm_content=alert
lowtechcyclist
@Rob in CT:
They keep trying to get me to re-subscribe, but shit like this is why it ain’t happening. I can always read the WaPo for free through the county library website if I want to.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin:
First it hit $4 because of Katrina, then it hit $4 again during the banking crisis.
In 2008, with prices in the high 3’s, someone asked me, what do you think gas will be six months from now? I said, $2.38. They said no way, and I said they’ve shot past the tolerance mark, demand is going to go down. Six months later I was right. And they stayed low for a pretty long time, even got sub-$2 for a while.
Gas prices can fluctuate a lot. Right now we’re probably were we would be if they followed a normal trajectory.
Miss Bianca
Headline from Colorado Politics this morning:
“US jobs report likely to show a solid gain, potentially complicating Fed’s drive to cool inflation”.
Le sigh. They just can’t fucking help themselves, can they?
Uncle Cosmo
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Same here, sweetie. It took most of my lonnnng life to realize that most of the Y-chromosome-afflicted hate shopping with a white-hot fervor. Me, I will cackle for days about the great buy I stumbled across while browsing in a market or department store. And don’t get me going about winnowing out cheap(er) transatlantic flights… :^D
Ksmiami
@Soprano2: the best analogy for the market is that it behaves like a 16 yr old girl… Mostly feelings based ups and downs.
@NotMax: you forgot to mention white…
Eolirin
@Rob in CT: Even beyond the editorial thumb on the scales that owners push into this stuff, the inherent business model is fundamentally incompatible with good investigative journalism.
All of the majors have become content farms and their business models require constant engagement to drive profits. Good journalism is slow and expensive and there needs to be something filling the 24/7 space because that’s where all their money is. The only thing cheap and abundant enough to fill that space with is gossip and speculation so that’s what we get.
Genuine news doesn’t happen every day. Getting a story right especially if it’s an important one can take months of legwork and generates zero return that whole time.
Even beyond the bias we have to deal with the Reality TVing of news media and it’s killing us. I have no idea how things can improve.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin:
+ eleventy-billion
There were too many things misallocated in the run-up-to COVID and during the Pandemic. When people need masks, they’ll pay a lot for them. When people need to work at home, they’ll pay a lot to get their home office fixed up. When people don’t drive, gas prices fall. All that was temporary.
Inflation was far too low for far too long. There was far too much money in the banking and non-banking systems that wasn’t doing anything productive. Suddenly, people actually needed stuff NOW and lots of them had money to pay for it, so inflation kicked up. Wages stepped up. And it was easy to see that it was temporary – it was resetting the baseline, but people’s definition of temporary varied a lot.
Politicians screaming about inflation, while cutting things like the child tax credit which actually helped with real inflation, meant that the FED felt it had to jack up rates – even though bird flu and one-time housing adjustments and COVID and demand for labor had little or nothing to do with an “overheated” economy. Labor unions are still weak, few have wage increases tied to the CPI, so there’s little to no sign of a wage-price spiral. Greenhorn economics reporters have no idea what that actually looks like…
Anyway, inflation is coming down – as of course it was going to (what with not setting $B on fire in Afghanistan any more, etc.). Over-capacity is going to keep car prices from increasing as fast in the future, and prices may actually fall (especially as trucks continue to get more and more expensive and people seek alternatives). Single-family housing increases are going to slow as Boomers continue to sell their homes.
I still think there’s a good chance of the 2020s being another “Roaring Twenties”. If we can keep the monsters out of office…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
ljdramone
@Ken: I spent the summer of 1977 bicycling from New York to Seattle.Wall Drug was a kind of torture — 200 miles of hot asphalt (3 or 4 days) across South Dakota, with billboards every couple of miles saying “Wall Drug: Free Ice Water! Only 150 Miles” or “75 miles! Wall Drug: Root Beer in the Shade!“
Rob in CT
@Eolirin:
All of this rings true. And the harsh fact is that even someone like me isn’t paying for good investigative journalism. I could be given money to ProPublica or individuals like Balko or Jedd Lugum (sp?)… but I don’t. Maybe someday I’ll fix that. But not this day.
So it’s about eyeballs & clicks and that means it’s about controversy, which is why they love Donnie from Queens. He says stupid/awful shit everyday and all they have to do is quote it.
Uncle Cosmo
Some??? Try damn near all!
The appropriate analogy is to those frackin’ phone trees: Every organization with a phone number has gleefully offloaded the vast majority of its “customer assistance” operations onto the customer her/himself – because they don’t have to pay for it. (To the point where at one time there were internet websites with lists of “customer-assistance” numbers for lots of organizations together with the numbers the customer needed to punch in, in the proper order, to reach a real live human being far more likely to understand the problem than the automated system.) AI is going to be even cheaper for the vulture crapitalists – and even less likely to be able to resolve customer issues in any acceptable way in any acceptable time frame. Bastards!
Rob in CT
Speaking of Balko:
This is my surprised face.
Another Scott
@Chief Oshkosh: Wasn’t this sort-of inevitable after that case long ago where a handshake as enforced as a contract? 1983 – Pennzoil v Texaco, etc.
Thumbs-up is pretty clear. The other Eleventy-billion emojis, not so much.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
@Shalimar:
In the alt-reality where DJT won the 2020 election, he would have followed through with the surrender/withdrawal that he and Pompeo and etc negotiated, it would have gone far worse than the mostly-well-executed withdrawal under Biden’s presidency, and the press narrative would have been “the best withdrawal in history”.
Kirk
@SFAW: yeah, misread dates on my phone.
Another Scott
@Alison Rose: It’s not uncommon. And monthly data is noisy (government numbers are revised 1-2-3 months later before being “final”). ADP is only private employment, and there are other differences.
The trends usually track pretty well over time, but single month numbers shouldn’t be relied on as being gospel.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Kay: it’s kind of amazing: they evacuated appx 130,000 people at the cost of 13 soldiers and marines.
probably the most successful withdrawal in history and people complain about it non-stop.
Uncle Cosmo
@Soprano2: I see one of the sickest jokes in retail these days at the local Lidl supermarket (whose borderline-criminal pricing I have railed at here before): Minuscule price drops. I once saw in giant type a price drop on a box of cookies of – ready for this? – $0.01. That’s right, one lousy cent, trumpeted as if they were giving away steaks for free. As I’ve said, I like the people who work there, but the owners are a bunch of price-gougy bastards.
Uncle Cosmo
Inveterate mathematician that I am, I finally got hit with a clue by 4 after the umpteenth time running on fumes looking for the cheapest gas, when I realized that a $0.30/gallon increase in the price of burn juice corresponded to < $4 per complete fill-up of my Forte. Ten cents a gallon? Down in the ground clutter.
oatler
@Uncle Cosmo:
Now they pull you through the phone tree and if you’re still clinging they’ll disconnect you. “This Way To The Egress”.
Kay
@strange visitor (from another planet):
Right. And amid a Taliban takeover. But media are very, very good at hindsight is 20/20 and backseat driving. Jake Tapper can always do everything better than anyone who has a real job.
Soprano2
@strange visitor (from another planet): The problem is that they don’t compare it to other similar situations, they compare it to “perfect”, and of course it’s found wanting. “Why didn’t they get every last person who wanted to get out on a plane?” and “Why did any military people have to die?” (as if no military people had died there previously) are unreasonable standards that the press tries to hold the Biden administration to.
Kathleen
@rikyrah: I think many of them were treading the primrose path of dalliance and were pissed that they had to go home to their families.
Eolirin
@Kay: Some of it was emotional; a number of reporters had cultivated very personal relationships with sources on the ground there that they went back to over and over again for twenty years. They were suddenly in danger.
But it’s still shitty journalism and puts extreme lie to the idea that these people are objective observers of truth. They’re intensely invested in their cliques and the personal connections they make and have no perspective or understanding beyond that. They’re people who only know how to talk and not how to reason, who have very limited experience and expertise, and confuse having covered other people talking about a topic as a replacement for knowing a topic.
strange visitor (from another planet)
@Soprano2: i would have been ok with that if they’d also asked why tang the conqueror reduced force levels to what, 2,500 for the entire country?
Kayla Rudbek
@SFAW: John Scalzi’s blog entries on paying the writer is what I thought of
Chief Oshkosh
@Another Scott: The hand-shake to complete a deal is common. A thumbs-up might mean the same thing, or it might mean “I agree with how these negotiations are going. Let’s continue this discussion after the weekend…” or it might mean “yeah, I agree with what I think is your most recent statement about how much the Pats suck, now…back that contract negotiation…”
The possibilities are endless
ETA: And at the end of the day, why not simply and clearly state whether you do or do not accept a contract? What is the point of a contract if not clarity for both parties?
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2: That is an excellent point. How have other somewhat-comparable withdrawals gone?
Another Scott
@Chief Oshkosh: I haven’t reviewed the details, but my recollection is that in the 1983 case, there was a handshake on some items about the deal (over dinner, IIRC), but not everything was tied down. The court made them go through with it in spite of that.
IOW, the court broke the “we don’t have a deal until we have a complete deal and sign everything” rule.
The emoji lesson is, be careful what you thumbs-up.
Cheers,
Scott.