Just in time for Festivus: Feats of (market) strength!
lol larry looks like he's gonna cry https://t.co/DmnaQ9GL5s pic.twitter.com/gQriJ9xz8N
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) December 22, 2023
Almost as if the media has a hand in shaping public opinion (something I've been screaming about for years) pic.twitter.com/ehG7Q6e3Ux
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) December 22, 2023
https://t.co/2GwkeTwt9T pic.twitter.com/n6u4rjFgf6
— vocational politics appreciation account (@Convolutedname) December 21, 2023
Literally a day of mourning at the business desk of @nytimes … like, what will @jimtankersley & @jeannasmialek do now that they can't write about inflation being awful? I'm sure they'll figure something out, but they must be devastated. https://t.co/pxNnH3oMXN
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) December 22, 2023
"everyone." ??Instead of picking a narrative (we need to shit talk an economy with objectively good data so people blame Biden) and coloring your reporting accordingly, you can just stick to the facts even if it means you don't get the sugar high of Trump's return pic.twitter.com/Xer8Ui59aF
— scary lawyerguy (@scarylawyerguy) December 22, 2023
This graph tells a key story of this economy.
After the Great Recession, millions of people were stuck in long-term unemployment for years. It caused enormous pain and damage.
Not this time. The benefits of full-employment are massive. pic.twitter.com/unQaynOp1d
— Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) December 22, 2023
Please cease all inflation posting immediately, inflation is over, any future posts about inflation and high prices show that you are neither "with it" or "down with them"
— vocational politics appreciation account (@Convolutedname) December 21, 2023
cain
This is great news – as I want my savings to grow at this point! I’m never going to retire but I do need my nest egg to grow. :)
That said, tech has really sucked in terms of jobs. Lots of people are still out of work. It’s not the economy though. It’s likely because every damn tech business is looking at how to use AI and thinking they can dump people and use AI instead. I luckily work for a hardware company but they are doing their pivot as well and shedding a few jobs. My wife’s exhusband/friend has been looking for jobs now for 3 months approximately applying to about 20 jobs a day or so. My wife is also about to start looking for work and has also been applying for jobs. Lots of competition out there.
Raoul Paste
More of this, please
SpaceUnit
Nobody should be kidding themselves. Our corporate media will again be openly praying for a recession as we near the November elections.
ETA: Assholes.
Baud
“Economy improves as markets anticipate Trump’s restoration” /NYT
JaySinWA
Larry Kudlow is definitely looking like The Grinch that failed to steal Christmas.
japa21
@Baud: Okay Doug J.
That was a really good line.
m.j.
Government spending is a good thing. It always will be.
Tax and spend. Build. Develop. Help. Always.
Betty Cracker
@cain: Yeah, tech had the recession most sectors dodged. Being insanely over-valued might have had something to do with it.
Another Scott
@cain: Tech MotU: “Too many people are working and unemployment is too low! The economy isn’t cratering – in fact it is doing historically well! How will we replace all the workers with AI and collect our monopoly rents if we can’t argue that people are too expensive??!”
😠
Hang in there and best of luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
I forgot to ask which one, but got a/the covid booster Thursday. Didn’t have a response until that night when the ache woke me and stole my sleep from that point on. But last night was not an issue and it’s just sore to the touch.
Compare and contrast with the Moderna bivalent booster I got last time, which kicked my entire ass for several days, this one is a relative breeze.
Anecdotally, folks within my sphere are getting covid again so it’s worth chasing down IMHO. Did the double, with the flu jab in the other arm.
Betty Cracker
Since O/T, a question: Is anyone else watching For All Mankind? I have a theory about how the season will end (I think there are two episodes left), but I won’t bother speculating here if no fellow FAM fans are reading…
MomSense
The “news” outlets have been running the equivalent of 24/7 push polling.
’Is Biden too old’
’Who is responsible for high gas prices? Will high gas prices cause voters to abandon Biden and Democrats?’
’Inflation!!! How badly will this hurt Biden’
And so on. Even when they don’t come right out and blame him, the way they frame the issues harms Democrats.
lowtechcyclist
I never figured out the recession talk. A year ago, there was so much ground to cover between where our economy was, and the remotest prospect of recession. Not only did we have full employment, but we were really in a state of hyper-full employment, where there were shitloads of unfilled job openings at all times. To get to recession, first we’d have had to have that huge surplus of job openings mostly go away (I gather that’s finally happened, but it took until now), and only then would we have had normal full employment. And people spending like crazy…how are jobs going to go away while that’s happening?
Thank goodness Biden was there when Obama got snookered into way too small a stimulus to get us out of the Great Recession, and made sure he didn’t make the same mistake. Sure, it contributed to inflation, but far better that than massive unemployment! Instead, we got this hyper-full employment where even fast-food places had to start paying their peons $15/hour. Awesome!
p.a.
Or actively working to sabotage the economy.
Not to mention KSA & Putin doing whatever they can as well.
raven
@trollhattan: RSV?
Mike in NC
But Fat Bastard promised us that Sleepy Joe would tank the economy! Of course Fat Bastard is both functionally illiterate and economically illiterate.
SpaceUnit
@p.a.:
Yeah, the Saudis are gonna cut production like clockwork. We should have bulldozed that whole country after 9/11.
Before 9/11, actually.
bbleh
Does ‘Soft Landing’ Portend Recession?
Where Will The Price Drop Stop?
A panel discussion by The Times
bbleh
Also, too, “you can prove anything with statistics,” and “I don’t believe that.”
HinTN
@raven: We’ve been eyeing that one but haven’t pulled the trigger yet.
Urza
@cain: Tech cut jobs early and wanted attrition in the thought that the economy would take a downturn. AI is their excuse not to hire too many back. But hiring is slowly starting up. Its going to be slow hiring for awhile, but at least its finally happening.
Redshift
@Betty Cracker:
As far as I could see, a lot of it was our totally data-driven tech CEOs looking around and saying “everybody else is having layoffs, so that must be the thing to do,” like toddlers chasing the soccer ball.
NeenerNeener
I got a call from a mortgage broker yesterday that she can get me a 15 year mortgage at around 4.4% as long as I don’t drop dead before 1/16/24. The new house has zero stairs to fall down.
Baud
@NeenerNeener:
👍
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@JaySinWA:
Klowns like Kudlow are lucky I’m not king.
zhena gogolia
@JaySinWA: To be fair, he does smile later in the clip.
rekoob
@Betty Cracker: For what it’s worth, I’m watching “For All Mankind”. I got started with streaming because of “The Man in the High Castle” and I’ve found alternate-history takes very interesting. I believe Apple has done a good job with it. I’m fond of the “Hi, Bob!” meme in the series.
For those not watching, the current season is focused on bringing an asteroid into orbit to mine its riches. I’ll leave it at that to avoid spoilers.
trollhattan
@raven:
That’s next on my shopping list. Can only take so many jabs at once.
kindness
Well….the MSM & Village Elders do love them some Republican Daddies you know.
Geminid
@SpaceUnit: The Saudis have been trying hard, but they are having a tough time maintaing higher oil prices. One reason is that US production keeps setting records. We are now producing over 13 million barrels a day and are the world’s largest producer by far.
The news site Oil Price is a good source on this subject. They cover the energy sector in general and have a lot of stories on renewable energy developments, but about half their articles relate to the price of oil, short and long term.
Uncle Cosmo
FTFY. Welcome to World War O for Oligarchs, who used to own everything before 1929 and want it all back, with compound interest.
If they were only assholes – but they intend to use their great wealth to control and abuse the vast majority of us. Fuckem!
cain
All the media is owned by American/Russian/Chinese oligarchs. They are probably doing this across the globe.
trollhattan
@rekoob:
Just stumbled across it and binged up to current season.
Collapsing under its own weight with too many competing subplots and implausible technical advances for the timeline ATM-IMHO-PDQ-ETC. But the first couple seasons are a lot of fun. Production value also very good.
cain
@Urza: Indeed. You are right that they were probably thinking of a downturn. Hiring is still a pain at the moment, but Q1 should be much better I think.
trollhattan
@Geminid: The open presence of hydrocarbon industries and nations at COP28 was distressing, as they’re try their utmost to delay, delay, delay renewables development. And holy hell, the PR flacks who agree to interviews just shovel such utter shit (“We’re helping fight climate change by supplying gas to nations currently stuck using coal” an actual quite) they must have studied the tobacco, lead and asbestos industries diligently.
Redshift
A carry-over airing of grievances for this topic:
I work for a news company (in tech, not on the news side, but I do have some interaction with them and I get a lot of company info.) I’ve given up arguing this here, so I’m going to do it just once for Festivus: “The press” isn’t doing what they do because “they want Trump to win because he as good for business” or “getting them clicks” or because owners or editors are Republicans and telling them to write pro-Republican stuff. That’s not how the news business works, and people go into print journalism because they care about it, not to do churn out things they don’t believe (there are other jobs doing that that are more stable and much better paid.)
This is all barely more than a liberal version of a conspiracy theory — wanting a simple explanation for why thing happen that you don’t like. There are serious problems with political coverage in this country, but that doesn’t mean the people responsible know exactly what they’re doing and are causing all of it intentionally. And it especially worries me when I hear blanket statements about how the news overall is crap, because part of the disinformation/authoritarian project is trying to make you believe that you can’t know the truth or there is no truth. I know most of us don’t really believe that all news is BS, because we still cite news coverage, but lots of people still say it. News is important, especially now, and losing it is very bad for a lot of the things we want.
Uncle Cosmo
Oh wait, lemme guess:
Nihilist terrorist cell seizes spacecraft, flies to the asteroid and overwhelms its crew and redirects it to crash down near Bermuda. Resulting tsunamis, wildfires and secondary debris bombardment renders Earth uninhabitable. Terrorists intercept bazillionaires trying to escape the planetary destruction, kill them all, then commit mass suicide as the world burns. The End.
…no? ;^D
cain
@Uncle Cosmo:
Plus, they’ll use that downturn to buy more land as well. Gen Zs will be even worse off than the millennials. If you didnt have generational wealth from boomers/gen x – you’ll be in trouble finding and owning housing and so on.
We definitely have a classist fight going on.
zhena gogolia
@Redshift: So how do you explain the obsessive focus on “her e-mails” and Biden’s age?
Sister Golden Bear
@Redshift: Doing layoffs when lots of other companies are doing layoffs is a great way to cover up mistakes by corporate executives. “We didn’t fuck up, it was the economy, really.”
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
Tech also had a techbro fad for layoffs for no particular good reason; some of it was simply because other tech bro leaders were doing them. (Sure, there was some over-hiring; that can be fixed in ways other than mass layoffs, though.)
The flensing knives have not be wielded competently,, IMO.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
We have a jackal whose reporter daughter was specifically asked by the NYT to find women marchers who were disappointed on Biden. I think the daughter left the business.
I agree, however, that most day-to-day reporters are just doing their job, but our complaints are more about what the media pushes.
ETA: Also, even without malice, a reporter can unconsciously brings a story a cultural viewpoint that views Dems with certain preconceptions in mind.
Betty Cracker
@rekoob: I am also enjoying it a lot. The ripple effects they come up with for the alternative time line are fascinating, and they’re often mentioned in passing so easy to miss, e.g., Senator Jimmy Carter, Senate Majority Leader Feinstein, email is d-mail, etc.
If you are all caught up, below is a not-spoiler because it’s speculation, but if you’re NOT all caught up there is a spoiler in the set up, so read on with caution…
So Ed and Dev are planning to hijack the asteroid the M7 countries want to tow to earth’s orbit and put it into Mars’ orbit instead so that Happy Valley remains a going concern. My theory is they’ll fuck up somehow and send the asteroid on a collision path with earth, and Aleida and Margo will have to work together to avert disaster.
mrmoshpotato
I hope he did! To Hell with these piles who want the economy to be in the shitter!
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Also, too many economists reacted to the pandemic and pandemic recovery as though it was an ordinary economic event. It wasn’t. But these mainstream economists kept looking for the standard economic indicators and models instead of looking at what was actually happening in various sectors.
From what I could see, recovery was always stronger than the prospect of recession. But uneven in some states and cities.
However I will note that Fed policy has largely been correct. And the Biden administration economic team has done a great job.
ETA. It still irks me that economists and economic pundits who criticize the administration easily get more air time than Biden officials on the mainstream news and pundit shows.
cain
@Baud: the work by ProPublica is so invaluable – it’s the kind of journalism we need. They have been very effective vs the other media companies.
rekoob
@trollhattan: Fair point. It reminds me of Rob Lowe’s character in “Thank You for Smoking” in which the improbable can be handled with “It’s an easy fix, have a character say ‘Thank God we invented the y’know, whatever device'”. There’s an element of Douglas Adams in it, I believe.
p.a.
Joe “The Deflator” Biden and the Deflateocrat party tank the economy!😉🤣
Another Scott
@Urza: I blame Zuckerberg.
He spent a bazillion on his “Metaverse” stuff and tried to convince everyone else that it was the next big thing and one had to get in early to buy their virtual land with their NFTs and suchlike.
And when the reality that nobody was there and nobody was going to be there anytime soon, and that Zuckerberg had actually set billions of dollars on fire began to sink in, then everyone panicked that the banksters were going to punish their stocks for setting billions of dollars on fire, so they went to the old standby of slashing payrolls.
(I see the oh-so-serious economics reports are saying that tech companies expanded too much during the pandemic, without mentioning things like Meta…)
Fundamentals will catch up, eventually, because reality always wins. Eventually.
“AI” is the latest version of this get – in – on – the – ground – floor – or – get – left – behind panic. We’ll see who is left standing after these bonfires die out.
Hang in there, everyone.
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
By in-large investigative journalists have been doing fine work. But 24 hour news (that’s my festivus thing) has always sucked with its gigantic village of “experts” where opinion becomes ‘fact’. The line between reporting and pundit nonsense is thin.
Let’s not forget all the right wing thinktanks that are out there writing position papers and what not and then cramming it down the 24 hour networks.
lowtechcyclist
@kindness:
But there aren’t any Republican daddies, just GQP drunken uncles. Problem is, the media still treat them like daddies.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: My second Moderna dose in April 2021 had me waking up in the middle of the night with teeth chattering chills for about 15 minutes. Good times. Guess it worked! 🤣
frosty
@Redshift: Thank you!!!! My brother and his wife are both former reporters and I’m sick of hearing the stuff about looking for clicks or owned by Republicans and being told what to write.
mrmoshpotato
@MomSense: Spot on, and fuck ’em!
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: VC money got a little harder to find.
My impression is that things aren’t as bad on the East Coast as on the West Coast. But it seemed like there was a period just in the first quarter of 2023 when businesses all over were generally unwilling to spend money. Then it got better.
Baud
@cain:
With print media, headline writers are often the culprit, rather than the reporter.
Another Scott
@Another Scott:
Link fixy:
buy their virtual land with their NFTs and suchlike
Sorry.
Cheers,
Scott.
HumboldtBlue
@Betty Cracker:
Homes, I watched this video and immediately thought of you. Merry Xmas, Cracker!
Matt McIrvin
@rekoob: We’ve been watching For All Mankind, started late and are still in the 1990s season about the Mars race… and as a big space nerd, my impression is that the show gets less plausible as it goes on. It seems to be a timeline where everything somehow happens in as melodramatic a way as possible, to the point that it gets a bit silly. (I heard that Chris Hadfield is not a fan…)
They went in a big way for the “lunar helium-3 fusion solves all the world’s problems” trope, which is a suspension-of-disbelief killer for me, but I guess if you’re trying to play to space fans it will please a lot of them.
Chetan Murthy
@frosty: Nobody “tells” reporters what to write. Instead, they just promote the Ken Vogels, the Peter Bakers, and somehow find a way to fire Radley Balko. And there’s also the ample evidence of interviews Dean Baquet has given.
But really, all you have to do is note that the Cult of Bothsides is still strong with the media, and how easy it is to game that.
cain
@Baud: 100%
rekoob
@Betty Cracker: Yes, I’m caught up. I can see the plot developing that way. There’s also the possibility that Kelly Baldwin’s search for life will expand beyond Happy Valley. As @trollhattan points out, there are a lot of subplots that could fan out.
I’ve enjoyed the Extras on Apple TV+ that map out the alternate-history used in the series and contrast them with what actually happened.
It’s fun to think about ubiquitous videocalls and electric vehicles in the 80s/90s rather than now. A self-funding NASA!
karen marie
@zhena gogolia: Laziness.
trollhattan
@mrmoshpotato:
So many of them now I lose track, but believe mine were Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer, Pfizer, Moderna, Mystery. #s 2 and 5 kicked my ass like being hauled out by the dumpster and mauled with lead pipes.
And last summer I finally caught the ‘rona, so there’s that.
cain
Installing a new router/wifi that’s been sitting in my closet for like over a year. The process is dumb. I like the fact I can just use my phone instead of the old browser method. But this thing does this:
1) set ups the whole thing
2) checks for firmware updates
3) updates the firmware
4) resets the entire configuration I did with the modem
5) I have to start all over again
Moronic.
trollhattan
@rekoob:
Yep, senators wanting to raid the NASA coffers cracks me up.
SpaceUnit
@Redshift:
Sorry friend, but I’ve been watching for too long to think media bias is all in our heads.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: Is it a cookbook?
zhena gogolia
@Citizen Alan: That’s “To Serve Man”!
Citizen Alan
@Redshift: So your position is that the near universal effort on the part of the media as an institution to destroy the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore among other dems was the result of gross negligence rather than malfeasance. Good to know. Got any evidence for that?
cain
@Citizen Alan: I interpreted RedShift’s response to mean that it isn’t the reporters.
Perhaps, they can further elaborate what they meant?
Urza
@Another Scott: Not a bad take on it. I had already forgotten all the Metaverse shenanigans. VR people were some of the first let go at the major tech companies.
AI now is ‘something’ but from an insider perspective I do not think it is nearly as much as the hype is trying to make it “yet”. Maybe someday, maybe even the next version. But right this second, definitely not. At least its actually profitable and people are finding uses for it though as opposed to the Metaverse.
The Clouds did expand at amazing rates during the pandemic as growth that was going to happen eventually happened all at once. It was hard to keep up with. And that growth plummeted after to lower levels than expected because it had been moved forward. It will normalize eventually though.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Citizen Alan: perhaps it is Malicious Animal Magnetism
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Reminded of the Canadian Victorian era detective series Murdoch Mysteries. Fingermarks for fingerprints, and so on.
Semi-spoiler ahead:
.
.
.
.
While I understand the why from a dramatic standpoint, For All Mankind as an ensemble piece suffers without Gordo.
Another Scott
@Redshift: Thanks for your perspective.
News is a huge business with lots and lots of variations. What’s happening at FTFNYT isn’t the same as what’s happening at VOA or RFERL or ProPublica or Fox News.
I saw this today:
(PLOSOne is a very well regarded open-access journal.)
eta: FYWP is breaking the link – https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367
Cheers,
Scott.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Another Scott: bad link (404) at bottom; click through Mastodon works.
So, language models are good for something.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
And of course the actual news stories might be better than the headlines.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Well, the United Arab Emirates hosted the darn thing, and Azerbaijan will host the next one. As they say, turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving.
I read about how a lot of people were disappointed by COPA 28. I am very interested in the clean energy transition myself, but these big meetings just don’t mean that much to me. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that’s where the problem is going to be solved. The UN’s IPCC already set the goal of a carbon-neutral world economy by the year 2050,* and to me these conferences are fancy debates on how to get there.
I look up “clean energy news” every couple of days and I am impressed by the level of activity that’s going on now, both in applications and in research. We might not see that much tangible progress yet, but that’s because we’re just beginning the clean energy transistion.
* British climate scientist Myles Allen gives good, short overview of the challenges and opportunities for meeting that goal in his article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled, “The Green New Deal: a View From Accross the Atlantic” February, 2019. Allen worked on the IPCC panel that set the goal in its report of October, 2018.
ColoradoGuy
The contrast with the Austerity/Brexit policies of the UK are stark and horrifying. It makes the intent of the Tory class war clear … to push down the middle and lower classes as much as possible, and to do it over decades so the effects are permanent.
Suzanne
It has been a busy day here. Mr. Suzanne and I took Spawn the Younger and two of her friends, plus Spawn the Youngest, to the amusement park last night to celebrate Younger’s birthday. Then the kids slept over. But I still got up at 6 AM, and got to the grocery store before it opened at 8, and picked up our Christmas roast. Then to Trader Joe’s for flowers and ingredients. Then to the French bakery for a Yule log. Got home, unpacked, then took the puppy for a walk. She’s increasingly getting the hang of the leash, though she still objects to certain areas of pavement and I don’t get it. Then I did an absolutely disgusting/sweaty/fantastic hot power yoga class. Then we just took the puppy to the dog park for the first time! OMG, she ran so hard that she fell asleep on Mr. Suzanne’s lap on the way home.
Citizen Alan
@cain: And I disagree with them.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
From which arises the term “burying the lede”. It’s well-understood that the headline and the first few grafs are all most people read. So it really doesn’t matter at all what’s down in paragraph nine: it’ll have a negligible impact on the public’s understanding of events.
When newspapers engage in this sort of behaviour, what they’re doing is constructing a “beard”: so later when they’re accused of misrepresenting the news, they can point at that eighteenth para on page A42 as proof that “yuh-unh, we *did* cover that!”
Another Scott
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Maybe! ;-)
I started skimming through the article and see that they use the “All Sides Media Bias Chart” to divide up the political leanings of the news sources.
Um, I don’t know if that chart is very useful if they put Democracy Now! and FTFNYT “(opinion)” in the same category…
:-/
Still, interesting paper.
Cheers,
Scott.
twbrandt
@Citizen Alan: my take is that “the media” is much more than the NYT/WaPo/Fox/MSNBC. There are a ton of regional and local outlets out there doing their thing. There is a ton of specialty media concentrating on the tech sector, or the financial sector, or whatever. Nor do reporters decide what gets assigned or what get front-paged.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: That sounds like a full–and pleasant–day.
cain
@Another Scott: I saw that too – on mastodon like you and I had booted it. :)
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s been hectic and I’m so tired…. but picking up Spawn the Elder from the airport at midnight….. so miles to go!
dmsilev
@Betty Cracker: Interesting theory. Here’s my completely unfounded speculation: They’ll succeed at carrying out The Great Asteroid Heist, and both the season and the whole show will end with Mars declaring itself an independent polity. With all that mineral wealth, they can trade for the food and manufactured goods and stuff.
Citizen Alan
@twbrandt: And I am sure that the fine journalists and editors at the Hooterville Gazette can take pride in the quality of their work. But it is the people at NYT/WaPo/Fox/MSNBC who shape political opinion at the national level, and they are the ones who foisted George W. Bush and Donald Trump on us for literally no reason except petty, childish disdain for Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. Villago delenda est, indeed.
catclub
better yet, quadruple Solar, wind, and efficiency projects.
SpaceUnit
@catclub:
Okay.
But let’s bulldoze them anyway.
SpaceUnit
And Santa, if you’re reading this, all I want for Christmas this year is a framed 8 x 12 glossy print of that Sad Larry pic up top.
Jackie
HoHoHo! MSNBC showed that clip of Larry Kudlow on various MSNBC yesterday! The dude announcing the wonderful economic news should have handed Kudlow a wad full of tissues – he looked ready to burst into tears!
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: @zhena gogolia: Its unconscious bias. Ds are uncool. Reporters are cool kids or wannabe cool kids. So even if they lean left they will be of the red rose journo bro/sis variety. Check out the Twitter accounts of A list media editors/journalists etc., or just people who want to be considered cool and with it. Bashing Dems seems to be the ticket
Why is the party that is the one of the few sources of institutional power for black people (and other minorities) considered uncool by these cool kids is question they have to answer.
Jackie
The Lincoln Project is adding to the #DiaperDon stink with a new ad:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-smells-lincoln-project/
gene108
@frosty:
@Redshift:
The issue I have is with political reporting and all the areas of life it touches upon like the economy, healthcare, infrastructure, etc., with journalists who do not have any specific knowledge of what policy politicians are discussing and what politicians are either omitting, over promising, or just straight up lying.
I remember when Republicans, during Bush, Jr.’s terms in office, were rolling out high deductible HSA plans and talked about the free market fixing medical costs because of competition, informed consumers figuring what option is more economical, etc., and very little reporting seemed to cover the reality that (1) knowing how much medical care will cost ahead of time is virtually impossible in the U.S., and (2) people who need healthcare are a captive bunch of consumers. They are basically stuck with the proposition of paying more or suffering serious health issues when medical care becomes more expensive.
It’s like no reporter ever heard of the price elasticity of demand and how price often isn’t the deciding factor in a decision to make a purchase.
It’s just frustrating that their training as political reporters doesn’t seem to include basic economics, basic statistics, and so on, because so much of what they touch on involves a level technical knowledge they seem to lack about certain topics.
This basically turns their reporting into “he said/she said” stories, where knowing where the truth lies is murky, at best.
zhena gogolia
@Chetan Murthy: I got so tired of getting the response from the NYT, “Did you read the whole article?” No, I didn’t. I’m objecting to the way YOU’RE FRAMING IT FOR THE CASUAL READER, which is most of your goddamned readers.
zhena gogolia
@Citizen Alan: Not for “no reason.” Taxes.
zhena gogolia
@Jackie: Great! This was discussed before the 2016 election by that guy who worked backstage at The Apprentice, but he got no traction for it.
To be clear: My glee is solely reserved for Trump, as he threatens our nation with dictatorship. It is not targeted at other people with odor problems. Just Trump.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
I think media bias is often an unconscious thing, but mostly because major media figures grew up in cities, attended elite universities, and know a bunch of Democrats because people in urban areas are mostly Democrats. They also work in major cities like NYC, DC, and LA to a lesser extent.
Why bother reporting on what Hillary voters feel, in 2016, when I hear from them nonstop in my social circle. What I think America really needs to know are what do diner patrons in rural Ohio really think. They’re a mystery to everyone I know.
zhena gogolia
We’re at 482 on the Festivus thread!
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
At least now we know why so many people who talk to Trump have tears in their eyes.
Baud
@gene108:
And the Dems they know are only a small sliver of the party base.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: 😂😂😂
SpaceUnit
Here’s the thing about the media. The major media outlets are mostly all corporations or subsidiaries of corporations. Their boardrooms are stocked with wealthy older white men so they’re very Republican. No, they’re not the sort of trump trash who show up at the rallies with misspelled signs but they believe that the GOP is good for business and you’ll never convince them otherwise.
They don’t appoint some partisan to send out memos to the political desks and tell people what to write or say. But if you’re a reporter or on-air personality it’s mighty damn good for your career if you can favor balance over objectivity while maintaining a guise of neutrality. They’ll like the cut of your jib, and you’ll do very well. Report the news objectively and they’ll mark you for a liberal. Their sponsors, also corporations, will express concern.
And then of course there’s the new head honcho at CNN who stated outright that he wants their political coverage to emphasize balance. That’s not so subtle. He was outright telling his people to bothsides every story
The bias is real, and I can’t believe we’re actually arguing about that. Christ.
JPL
@raven: fully vaccinated and still I have been battling symptoms of the flu for four weeks. Good news though no fever.
BTW it sucks
Jackie
@zhena gogolia: I agree 100%. TIFG has personal staff up the wazoo and there’s just no excuse for his body odor. Other than everyone too afraid to say anything.
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: Go to hell. Go directly to hell!! 😂
JPL
@Betty Cracker: Can he pass go? oh yeah, that’s jail, but pretty close to the Fulton Cty facility.
CliosFanBoy
@Geminid:
How much do the Saudis produce a day?
Turgidson
@Mike in NC: I don’t see what Tunch has to do with this 😉
KSinMA
@NeenerNeener:
Great!–But please throw those socks away!
Scout211
@Jackie: Last month Kathy Griffin talked about the Trump stink with Mary Trump. She said,
So at least during the Celebrity Apprentice, the adult diaper smell wasn’t what she smelled.
I guess he has been smelly for decades now.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Is this the new Rickroll?
Miss Bianca
@Redshift: As a journalist mysef, I will tell you that I feel ya. But that I still find most political “journalism” to be sheer crap. Whether that’s intentional or not, it is, and no, I don’t think journalists should be let off the hook about it. As always, YMMV.
Splitting Image
@Jackie:
This is an ongoing problem with the guy. He once appeared at an airport with toilet paper stuck to his shoe. You’d think someone would have cared enough to tell him.
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: Hehe! Gotta check the schedule for SYFY’s Christmas marathon.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: The Christmas version, yeah. 😂🎄🎁
Geminid
@CliosFanBoy: So I looked it up, and CEIC Data (@ceicdata.com) said that Saudi oil production for November, 2023 was 8,998,000 barrels a day. They averaged 9,458,000 bbl/day from 2002 to last November. Their peak was 11,642,000 in April of 2020.
Russia produces 9,756,000 bbl/day, while Iraq produces 4,278,000, China 4,000,000, Iran 3,100,000 and Brazil 3,000,000 bbl/day.
mrmoshpotato
@SpaceUnit:
Same here, Santa!
Geminid
@Scout211: This is great. Next week Trump will be telling Hew Hewitt how he’s one of the best smelling people ever.
Turgidson
@schrodingers_cat:
This is a useful rubric – it explains their Obama coverage too. He *was* cool to them. They wanted him to think they were cool too. He didn’t (because, obvs) and often wasn’t subtle about it. Then they got catty and tried to make it a scandal any time he farted.
RevRick
@Mike in NC: In that respect Trump is a bog standard Republican. Our local newspaper publishes a weekly op-ed by a Heritage Foundation “economist.” Like clockwork, he rails against Democrats reckless spending, and like those Americans for Prosperity (Koch) ads, he peddles narratives that seem reasonable, but are completely dishonest.
What is omitted is the dishonesty. The Heritage Foundation essentially asserts that all government spending beyond the military and policing is reckless spending. They want to privatize Social Security and Medicare, and abolish things like Medicaid and SNAP. They want to ease regulations that hinder business growth… like environmental regulations, occupational safety regulations, insurance and financial regulations, and… you get the idea. They want to cut taxes so “you” get to keep more of your money. Woohoo!
Except, their shrink government to the point you can drown it in a bathtub agenda will make us all poorer. The market has little incentive to provide many needed services, and less than zero to do so for those whose needs are greatest.
The thing every $ of spending is a $ of income for those providing services of government. And unlike the wealthy, who will add one more offshore account, they will spend the money on foolish things like groceries and rent and clothes and cars, meaning $ for all those workers.
GOP economics hasn’t changed since Herbert Hoover.
geg6
@SpaceUnit:
Bravo, exactly right. My mother was newspaper reporter from the late 60s to the early 90s. And I worked for several years in newspaper advertising, so I was around journalists all that time. I also dated an editor for our major metro paper back in the 80s. So I have a lot of knowledge about how journalism used to work and how it doesn’t work today. And all I can say is that I, that now-retired editor and my late mother agree with every word you wrote.
JR
@Another Scott: I think the tech freeze (also biotech) can be explained simply by high interest rates causing a capital freeze. Without cheap money everywhere it’s hard to expand and these are businesses that live on speculation with basically zero income and a whole lot of growth.
Uncle Cosmo
So fucking what???!?? Most casual viewers/readers never look past the headline, which then determines what the story signifies in their heads. I am more than half convinced that over the last 2 generations the Far Wrong deliberately ignored those who wrote the stories and concentrated on infiltrating positions responsible for drafting the headlines to the stories, for that exact reason.
SpaceUnit
@geg6:
Thank you. I really appreciate that.
Villago Delenda Est
@SpaceUnit:
Hence my nym. Wipe them out. All of them.
wjca
Pretty much. Although high tech is a small enough world that fads of any kind can sweep thru. (Before the next year is out, we could see a hiring rush, and howls to allow more H-1B visas right now! With equal real world basis.) The ones who succeed are those who manage to resist the fads. Maybe not totally avoid them, but just not go whole hog on them.
And anybody who has actually used AI, as opposed to just hearing the hype (or panic about how it will take all our jobs), is aware that it isn’t ready for prime time. Impressive as it is in some narrow areas, it’s got a lot of work still needed.
wjca
They act more like they’re on LSD, rather than drunk.
Martin
@Redshift: That was it. It was investor pressure, which is why everyone laid off about 6% of workforce. That was the magic number sacrifice investors demanded.
None of these industries are actually related so the idea that there was some sector downturn was absurd. Hardly any of these companies actually compete with each other. Apple is a hardware company, Google an ad company, Netflix a streaming content company, Amazon mostly a broad-based retailer.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: The sector-wide connection was simply the dependence on VC money
edit: …but a lot of these firms do business with one another too. If other tech firms aren’t willing to spend anything, the firms that sell stuff to them don’t get paid.
Brachiator
@gene108:
@schrodingers_cat:
And yet these reporters never feel a need to talk to black or Hispanic voters, except when they just “happen” to run into a supposed Trump supporting non-white voter.