BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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This is such a deliberately inflammatory and misleading headline that I wish I could say I was surprised people who claim to be independent critical thinkers are falling for it, but of course it's not actually that surprising at all.

House Resolutions are practically meaningless, and you could fill books with incredibly moronic examples. Not to mention, priming ourselves to be constantly outraged over things that have no practical effect at all makes it harder to drum up support for criticizing things that are actually worth the outrage. Senator Rubio, for instance, re-introduced a bill this year that would offer support to government agencies that impose sanctions on any association with the BDS movement, just for one example.

If people would take half the outrage they get over stupid shit like this and instead pick up the phone for five minutes to call their Representative and urge greater humanitarian conditions on any Israeli aid package, that would actually accomplish something more useful than a fun little dopamine hit from being angry.

Spoiler: he is homeless

That's an inherent flaw in that kind of car-centric design. Even then, red states have the same fundamentally flawed design; it's just not being stretched to the breaking point like a lot of blue cities are. That's just a matter of time though.

Population density can go way higher than what's in most of LA without turning it into Manhattan, but you have to make significant investments in transit to support it. There will always be people who want large detached single family homes with 2.5 cars, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn't be the only option the way it is in most of the country.

TIL I am an economist

No, that would be like people re-defining all sickness to be a cold, and then getting annoyed when their doctors tell them that Chlamydia is not, in fact, a cold and won't be cured by time and Tylenol.

Well, we do already fund a ton of foreign aid all over the world, so quite a lot of that is already happening. But to address those particular things: homelessness is not a problem where simply throwing money at it magically solves it; it's incredibly complex. New York City alone spends 3.5 billion dollars a year just on homelessness. The only financial solution to gun violence is to bribe the SCOTUS to repeal DC v. Heller. Drug policy is largely in the hands of the states, but even then, there's no simple solution to it, particularly when you have to deal with local politics for things like treatment facilities. Prisons are largely state operated. Personal debt is largely outside the scope of the federal government, but even then, student loan forgiveness was attempted. But to throw a number at it, redirecting all Ukraine aid towards individual credit card debt would pay for only 10% of it.

Are there particular federal programs of comparable financial impact with sufficient political support that you think would pay significant returns if boosted by foreign aid money (ignoring the general decline in global stability that would ensue).

Will you be willing to pay higher taxes to fight off the drug cartels in Central and South America?

I mean, the economic dividends there are obvious. If it really was as simple as throwing some money at Central and South America in order to make the cartels vanish forever and turn those countries into stable countries that we could do significant trade with, we'd earn far more than we paid. But that price tag doesn't actually exist, because these problems are more complicated than simply throwing money at them.

I completely agree, but if people are talking about specific elements of economic theory, then we should accurately talk about it. If we don't hold ourselves to some kind of intellectual standard, then words become meaningless and incredibly easy to twist into fitting whatever agenda you like. A Republican could easily say that inflation has been caused by oppressive taxes and the obvious solution is to slash taxes, mostly for the wealthy of course, but with a mild tax break for the middle class to make it politically palatable. If you know anything about how inflation actually works, you'd know that this would simply make inflation even worse as consumers suddenly have a bunch of new cash to spend, further devaluing the dollar.

Money from flies spends just as well as money from butterflies.

You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.

I agree that's probably their main issue right now, and they're hardly unique there. You've seen layoffs and belt tightening everywhere as the free money faucets have dried up.

That said, I think the core business model isn't exactly challenging. Similarly to Netflix ten years ago, they're primarily serving content that they don't own, but unlike Netflix, they're probably not going to be able to pivot into content creation unless they want to actually become a proper label, and even then, they'd need big enough stars that other distribution platforms can't afford to not cooperate with them. Otherwise, they're always going to be at the mercy of the labels, though there is some balance, since the labels also need the streaming platforms to at least survive.

The money spent on Ukraine has been essentially pennies relative to any significant domestic program.

If you instead redistributed all the $113 billion spent since the invasion began in 2022, you could give each American a grand total of $340. A nice chunk of change, to be sure, but spread out over the course of the war, this is literally $15 a month.

Personally, I'm okay having $340 less over the course of nearly two years if the alternative is tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russia successfully re-asserting that violent conquest will not be resisted. Moldova would almost certainly be invaded next as well, since they're not in NATO. $15 a month is a pretty damn cheap price to pay to protect a democracy and save countless lives (not to mention, the torture and rape the Russian army has been committing as well)

There's some amount of fuzziness, yes, and as I said, most economists wouldn't call that 2022 dip a meaningful recession, but regardless, a recession is absolutely, by definition, a contraction in GDP. That has not been happening. GDP growth has been above +2% for the last five quarter, and in Q3 of this year, it was +5%.

There is no economist alive that will tell you that five quarters of GDP growth is a recession, because words have meanings.

Edit: And before you ask, yes, even adjusting for inflation, it's been five quarters of GDP growth. This doesn't imply that there are no economic problems happening, but a recession is not one of them. Not all bad weather is a tornado.

Pray tell, when was this mythical era when the Court only did what's right? Dred Scott in 1857? Upholding forced sterilization in 1927? Upholding Japanese internment during WWII? Plessy v. Ferguson upholding separate but equal in 1896? DC v. Heller in 2008 when it was suddenly decided that the 2nd Amendment granted an essentially unrestricted right to firearm ownership and use? Bush v. Gore in 2000 when the SCOTUS just casually decided an election? Exxon v. Baker in 2008 when they decided that damages from them Exxon Valdez spill should be reduced from $2.5 billion to only $500 million? Citizens United?

I don't think the present circumstances are nearly as historically unusual as you think they are.

I mean, this is a material and provable statement. I won't pretend to have data, but it's entirely possible at least that paying a football coach n dollars results in a return of 1.3n dollars.

I don't know if that's true, and it very much could be good ol' fashioned corruption, but it's not inherently implausible, and if it is true, then the choice is either pay for the coach and use the additional revenue to fund other programs, sports and academic, or don't, and have less money available for those other things.

I get that the optics don't exactly look great, but I wouldn't really agree with telling the women's lacrosse team that they're being disbanded because we decided that paying a lot for a football coach was a bad look and now the total sports budget is down.

Again, I'm not saying this is definitively what's happening; I don't have data or anything. But this is a legitimately plausible explanation for it. Of course, like I said, equally plausible is just plain corruption. I'd genuinely be curious in what the evidence says, to the extent that it exists.

This is true to an extent, but it's complicated. Money talks more than cultural vibes, and so to that end, there are plenty of smart and educated young people moving to southern states simply because of affordability. Texas in particular has been attracting a lot of tech workers who don't want to deal with cost of living in San Francisco or NYC.

The top ten states by net migration are: Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma

While the bottom ten are: California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota

Those bottom five also have the worst housing markets in the country, which probably isn't a coincidence. Blue states have been torpedoing themselves in the foot by not building enough housing to meet demand and causing prices to explode way past any semblance of affordability. While this data relates to all people, not just young educated people, and is also influenced by things like conservative boomers wanting to join DeSantis in building the Christian Republic of Florida, the effect of housing costs can't really be denied.

When discussing actual economic phenomena like inflation and recessions, yes, I think it is reasonable to actually be accurate and consistent in what we're talking about.

Inflation is one problem. Wages not matching the cost of living is another, though related, problem. Saying that inflation has largely returned to normal is true, regardless of whatever else might also be true. Someone saying that is not saying that all economic woes have been fixed and that no one has any right to complain about anything.

I'm guessing you're implying that Biden is saying that consumers need to stop whining because inflation has normalized. That would be pretty annoying, but he's not actually said that. In fact, he just recently gave a speech blaming corporations:

Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price gouging.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/white-house-supply-chain-bidenomics-wins.html

He's also launched several initiatives aiming to make supply chains more robust and thus prevent future shocks from impacting prices so severely.

Plenty of economists have been saying that avoiding a significant recession has been entirely possible. A recession is generally defined by at least two successive quarters of GDP decline, and while this did technically happen in 2022, the second quarter was only -0.6%, and the following quarter was back up to +2.7%.

It really needs to be stressed that not all bad economic circumstances are recessions. That's a very specific thing.

No facts, just vibes!

It should be clearly stated that recession is a technical term with a specific meaning, not a general term for a rough economy. Not all tough economic times are recessions. It is not at all a contradiction for lots of people to be struggling and for a recession to not be happening. This is not economists saying that everything is hunky dory and that people have no reason to complain, only that the specific phenomenon that is a recession is not occurring right now.

Edit: Just to put it explicitly, a recession is generally defined as two or more successive quarters in which GDP contracts rather than growing.

Spotify's issue isn't unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there's simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don't matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won't be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.