Natural gas is needed to make most highly efficient fertilizer and natural gas has just about doubled from prior to the war - this will increase the cost of food down the line, unless natural gas starts flowing freely from Russia again.
The article makes a lot of claims but uses almost no evidence. Half of it is complaining about adjusted numbers.. but does the author know that all public companies have to report GAAP as well, not only the adjusted numbers? Then there’s the claim of costs skyrocketing and drivers considering other options, but the used and new car market is absolutely crazy right now as well as gas prices. It feels like there could be substance but it is only surface level in this article.
Both inflation and wages are lagging indicators and thus can be used together to get real wages historically. Correlation to inflation does not mean anything other than inflation and wages both increased, you can be highly correlated but not exactly correlated. Real wages demonstrate both wages and inflation in a single metric and they are not increasing at the same rate, real wages have been declining continuously since 2020. The strength of a labor market (low unemployment) just means people that are looking for jobs can find them but doesn’t measure the wages or inflation, that is determined by real wages. You can pay anyone more but if it doesn’t buy more it is still a pay decline.
The website you linked as I said includes capital and pretax income which is an absurd way to measure “income.” That includes stocks, 401K, houses, etc. if someone owned a house, the value went up, but if someone didn’t own a house their actual wages are still worth only about the same as 3 years ago.
Real wages have gone significantly since 2020 when COVID hit per the below link. This inequality index website includes both labor and capital - meaning not just wages but income from stocks. Yes the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money. Wages, the payment for only labor has been declining in real terms due to inflation outpacing wage growth. See this link and the sharp decline.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
You are intentionally conflating nominal and real wages, most people are not making more money. In real wages they are declining as per the link in my previous comment. If you make $100K per year and your expenses are $100K you make zero. If you make $150K but your expenses are now $150K then you have not made any increase in wages in real dollars. Wages are not flat or going up with inflation as per my link, they are actually declining significantly since COVID.
Real wages are not increasing. The ‘Real’ part of real wages means after adjustment for inflation. See link, we’ve been going straight down in real wages. We are already back below pre-COVID wages. That means we are back to wage levels around 3 years ago. In any job if you got no raise in 3 years then you should not look at that as a good thing - and that’s what has happened to everyone, on average after accounting for inflation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
That’s exactly right. Real wages are not keeping up with inflation. Inflation is confusing everyone who isn’t used to seeing it. It’s ludicrous to think we are not in a recession just because more people retired in the last few years due to COVID and exited the workforce to artificially keep the unemployment rate low. Participation in the workforce declined something like 10% - I don’t have the time find the exact number. But we still have a lower overall workforce than pre-COVID. The 100K per year jobs are declining in availability but there’s millions of jobs at fast food and retail available. It’s obvious that it is purely political as to what makes a “recession.” Meanwhile lots of tech companies have lost 70-80% of their value. But the largest companies, apple, google, and Microsoft are holding up, we all know the small businesses go first.
I mostly agree but there isn’t really such a thing as beneficial regulation for tech companies. No rules is always the cheapest and easiest to implement. For example, why would a company even bother with disinformation in the first place if it wasn’t required by the government? You could argue for social reasons or say if you wanted your website to be like Wikipedia, that it serves some purpose, however trying to turn Facebook into Wikipedia seems like a gross misstep.
The bot solution is extremely simple, add more layers of human verification or a paid tier. It hurts the user experience in one way but enhances it in another. Why not at least require verification once per 24 hours? The trolls in person is not any better, we have enormous amounts of crime/lies in the real world. Being online actually protects users physically so much that now arguments are more over what is harming users mentally online. It seems dramatically better to ONLY risk your mental state than risk physical and mental harm in the real world. Someone being online has gotten a bad rap because people can get feelings hurt, but at the same time there are countless options to protect your feelings online also without banning other people. People have the tools to build a bubble around themselves but for some reason instead they often choose to build a prison around others instead.
I don’t think it’s a trick at all, it’s actually much worse than being kicked out of a public square. Making YouTube videos or Tweets or Facebook posts can be your job and facilitate your entire form of income. You spend 10 years cultivating a following and if you say or do the wrong thing, you don’t just lose the public square, you basically get fired. Yea you can try to diversify but the average person doesn’t do this, they build something somewhere specific. These platforms are tremendously important, both for speech and for peoples livelihoods. Banning people and the appeals should be much more of a delicate process than currently. Right now these moderators are akin to police departments with no court system. One day we will enact laws that force companies of certain sizes to have an appeal process, or in some way dedicate resources to accurate appeals, or maybe just force companies to keep records of the ban and give users the right to sue for mistakes, similar to workers have for with employers. We almost need an entirely new public court system to manage that process so the burden isn’t on companies or users. I don’t have the answers but at some point consumer rights will be needed to stop abuse or lethargy in moderation of important decisions.
I’m surprised this isn’t mentioned more. Removing ratings was a disaster, just personally as a consumer. You don’t feel engaged enough use their like/dislike system where as with a rating you got that feeling of contributing something and were contributing something. So, first you’ve removed engagement, that’s bad. And now we get these like 98% match type of rating systems, and every time you see a movie or show that is high match but you hate it makes you lose confidence in the whole system.
We’re talking about gaming here and the fact someone said “fucking idiot.” You’ve just used asshole is your response, so collectively we should get off our high horses, and recognize that in the real world people swear constantly. It’s not even like this was laser focused at one specific person, in my opinion this title is more evil and misleading than what he said.
I’m not saying they are. I’m saying that they are banning enough bots to make up 5 percent every 10 days. With that amount of bots being banned, the possibility of that amount also being missed from being banned is substantial.
It’s not that subjective anyone using twitter still sees spam accounts promoting a website, business, product, or scam on every post. Twitter just said they remove 1M spam accounts each day. Their mDAU is claimed to be around 200M. This means they are deleting around half a percent of their users every single day. That seems like a lot to be identifying to me, but doesn't really determine if they are deleting enough or not but does show me that being higher than 5% is very possible when you have to delete that many accounts every 10 days.
It’s not a good thing to have more bots at the same revenue because you aren’t just buying a companies past performance but their future performance. If advertisers thought they were buying 1M real person impressions and it turned out to be half bits, next time they pay you money they would only want to pay half as much.
Your right twitter might just be incompetent and not keep that data, but this would be one of the most basic forms of data you need for analysis when your entire revenue model relies on that statistic.
I’m taking about working between chains, not staying on a chain or other cryptos built on the same chain. Someone is building a decentralized exchange, the interaction or adding the next new crypto currency to that exchange and choosing how it is setting the price of the exchange or possibly relaying on other centralized exchanges - typically to set the exchange rate you would rely on the bid ask spread, but if it doesn’t look at other exchanges someone can just buy from one exchange where it’s cheaper and sell on the other. Have you seen office space? The movie where they make the program steel fractions of a penny in each transaction? This is doable in the setting of the prices and fees and the way rewards are set for liquidity, benefiting the person who created them - so who knows how these places work, no one except programmers, and maybe they gain trust over time from others that never had a problem with them before. But when something does goes wrong, who will foot the bill and be held accountable. That’s why centralized exchanges are a must because if something goes wrong you call the police.
I’m not even talking about defi here. Let’s say I just want to trade ETH into BTC or some random coin. I need to trust some website to get that done and be the decentralized exchange. Sure 1000s if websites claim to be decentralized exchanges but how as a user are you supposed to know they are working as they describe themselves? Simply you can’t without an insane amount of digging, so you have to trust a centralized exchange that is regulated by the government. Otherwise if the exchanges cheat you, steal from you, freeze your coins, go under, you just have zero recourse.
Centralized exchanges are a necessity. Who can you trust to trade into and out of fiat? Who can you trust to make a exchange? Who can you trust to use security that works with your wallet? Sure there are decentralized exchanges but how much does anyone trust those, and how decentralized are they really? What happens if those go down? Hell most people don’t buy their own crypto just because they don’t trust random websites that claim to have secure wallets let alone that if they make a non-reversible transaction that the other party will come through. There needs to be an enforcer, most likely a government, that adds threats if someone breaks any of the trust above. There needs to be a centralized exchange to facilitate all these activities. It isn’t forced but anything else is just not as practical, so the majority of people won’t do it outside of an exchange.
Defi isn’t just bullshit as far as I know, it is an actual scam that wouldn’t be allowed at banks - I’m surprised regulators haven’t shut down Defi yet. Doesn’t everyone wonder why exchanges advertise interest at 10% - 20% on deposits and at the same time advertises 0.1% loans to others. These things can’t coexist at the same and no one questions the method. What I understand they do is take your deposit and essentially lend that same deposit out 100 times over in a chain of transactions and different cryptos to pay you back interest - and then like Celsius eventually fail. How can they loan out the same cash 100 times? As far as I know, they take control of the deposit - loan that to someone and take that someone’s crypto as collateral, and then loan that collateral out taking collateral from others again, then loan that out, and so on. This is possible in the ecosystem by going between several different cryptos that all allow them to “Defi” with themselves as well. Basically they only need a very small amount of deposits to create a crazy number of loans. I won’t claim to be in the industry but this was the best explanation I’ve received yet, from essentially a leaked, on how they make money.
Some crypto are actually better but with the caveat that they are only better if you keep it in the crypto ecosystem. Trading in and out of fiat currency is probably the biggest hurdle for crypto. Going in and out of crypto comes with massive fees if using a trusted exchange, headaches in accounting (in two monetary systems) and calculating fiat taxes, it’s slow, and adds inefficiency. For example, you may accept bitcoin for your product but now you need to pay one of your suppliers who doesn’t accept bitcoin - convert what you received to dollars, calculate a gain/loss on the change in value of bitcoin from the time you sold your product to the time you are converting it to dollars, pay a fee on converting, and finally you need all the same fiat accounts, credit, etc to then pay your supplier. It’s completely inefficient. In a new country that only used bitcoin or another crypto, you eliminate internal volatility completely because everything is priced in crypto in a closed self sustaining economy. Cryptos are not as volatile against each other as they are against fiat, after established. All of the volatility problems crypto has are exactly because people view it as an investment vehicle, in theory a currency shouldn’t fluctuate itself, it should just measure value of other items in a consistent way. There are many reasons one of the feds two main goals is price stability, both the prices going up and down can hurt the economy in different ways. Had bitcoins and other prices been able to remain stable rather than deflating however many thousand percent then the ecosystem would have been much more robust by now. I know your thinking stable coins do that, but I’d argue stable coins are just an extension of fiat but allowing a non-government entity to print money, and the only stable coins worthwhile are those backed by fiat bank accounts holding ever single dollar and not allowing the company to use customer funds or accounts as collateral to make their own decisions but without the regulation of a typical bank.
As long as every bitcoin move is headline news there will always be a market for crypto. When these articles get no comments because it’s like arguing against flat earthers then it will be dead. The reality is it’s still nearly a trillion dollar market and the people like to debate and discuss it because of the uncertainty surrounding it’s demise, if it was settled no one would care and that’s when it would actually go to zero. Until then every drop is just another opportunity for someone buying.
Visa has also has value because it adds trust to the system. You can contest your charges and a lot of the fees go towards keeping that trust. Credit cards have tons of abuse but it’s backed by a level of insurance. I stopped using crypto because the fees were so high, it wasn’t simple (unless you use an exchange) and doesn’t come with that trust. Even the exchanges themselves fail because they are gambling with customer cash essentially. It’s like if my bank decides to put all the cash it was holding for me into Iraqi dinar because it has a feeling it was going to go up.
On the contrary, I think Musks use of interviews and twitter has only helped him and his companies every step of the way. If you have been following him you have seen that he recently announced that he would be voting republican for the first time ever due to the change in the party stances of democrats and to expect backlash from announcing so. It funny that we are seeing exactly that backlash. Not two weeks ago people were also complaining that Musk wanted to reduce the work force by 10 % and have people work from the office, although those may have been separate things, I believe the 10% reduction was a leaked e-mail. The backlash there also seemed unusual, and I only attribute it to his political stance, as his company has lost around 50% of its value on the stock market, along with most of the other tech related stocks and it was almost as if he correctly predicted the further decline of the market in general we have seen lately. His responses to that seemed incredibly reasonable, a reduction in workforce and costs and measure to improve productivity. And yet as I said the response was not well taken in the media or online, it seems in my opinion to have started once people were made aware of his political stance. A stance which he says has always been consistent whether voting democrat or republican, it’s just that the parties have shifted in certain ideologies a I think we can all remember when democrats were the free speech party and now that opposite appears to be true.
This reminds me of those tiktok videos that have a spouse complaining about their significant other. They complain in public about whatever behavior, typically insignificant things, I think you can search like cleaning strike and see some of them. Even if it was 100% true, the people come of as petty, rude and disrespectful for publicly a private matter that makes then the bigger asshole. That is between spouses and has caused divorces and between coworkers or a boss employee relationship I would expect nothing less than the employee to be fired.
OneDrive is just not as simple as DropBox. Dropbox you know what you get, an online file system that syncs to your computer. OneDrive always asks to backup local files when that’s not what I want it for and doesn’t have an intuitive interface that just works. It’s too integrated with other Microsoft products.
I kind of get both sides. They shouldn’t scan personal files at all but then again Dropbox files are also shareable and is kind of like YouTube in that way. So if in this case a guy has copyrighted content, which they own the copyright for, and are sharing copies of copyrighted content, how can an algorithm know it’s not some random person. It’s much more likely not to be the copyright owner than to be it. What’s the worst part imo is that there’s no recourse, no appeal process, no one to talk to for the mistake - except it seems via twitter.
Standards are a good thing but I’m not sure that we have reached this point where USB-C is functionally the best. If we could completely eliminate on all other types of connectors on not just phones but computers then I would say it’s time to standardize. Unfortunately on my computer if I want a 4K resolution and frame rate that is way 300 hz then is it even possible that can be done over a USB-C connector? Hopefully some expert can chime in but display port or hdmi 2.1+ or multiple of those cables is what is used typically, and if USB-c worked perfectly why isn’t that already replacing every single port on a computer? Phones will eventually be as fast or faster than the current computers, so why implement a limitation when it feels like phones are still at the baby steps in phone evolution? That is just data transfer and I’m no expert but I’m not certain either than charging has reached it’s final form either. Am I wrong, is the USB-c connector capable of infinite data transfer rate as long as your cable is good enough?