So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.

So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?

Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

The silver lining is that everyone from Lemmy, to youtube, to Bernie seems to have correctly identified the problem early on this time around, so much of the anger is being directed towards the party establishment for screwing up the easy win as it is towards Trump. The question is whether or not that anger can be turned towards productive action to gain control of the DNC, or will be quashed by the establishment once again.

Time, and agitation, will tell.

Given how entrenched support for Isreal is parts of the base and moreover how conflicted much of the middle ground of the community is, I expect a lot of them would have sat the election out. Of course I think playing both sides of the street did lead to a lot of them sitting it out, but I think the hope was that an week intermediate position would allow for unity and coalition building around issues that didn’t have your party primarily fighting itself.

And the Jewish voting population of PA is more than three times that. Now, that hardly means that they’ll all vote for Isreal, but it does mean that how that group breaks has a far more outsized impact and why Haris was focused so much on things that both sides can generally agree with like conditional aid.

I would have much preferred an actual hardline leftist stance of course, but at the end of the day Gaza does not seem to have played a significant part in this election.

Not really, without Pennsylvania Michigan doesn’t matter unless nearly every other swing state goes for her, and they don’t look like that’s even a possibility.

I’ve considered it, but as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Given you have to pay interest on short positions and can only make as much as the stock falls by, if they can keep the grift going for another year or two the market could crash and you would still turn a loss.

Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.

But outsourcing them to an collection of independent bureaucracies(companies) is so much more ‘efficient’ than one bureaucracy just building what it needs to.

Besides, the government owning and developing housing would just be a huge cost to the taxpayers given how unprofitable it is to own or sell real-estate. Why the government might even build enough to actually house all the people waiting on public housing and then rent out the surplus out at below market rates but above cost in order to help fund the service, and that sounds like it could cut into the profit margins of the poor landlords.

Nope, far better to make a deal where the government assumes the risk for the project if a project fails, and the corporations get to take all the extra profit if a project succeeds./s

Depending on how frequently it needs to be connected and how much tension it needs to hold, it might be worth taking a look at some Wago connectors, as i’ve generally been impressed by how well they hold. Not really an option if the connection needs to be regularly connected and disconnected, but if it’s just occasional it could be an option.

Outside of that I would second Aubeynarf’s suggestion, but don’t have much personal experience with them.

What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

Biggest /s possible.

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.