Here is the time series so you can see the stats for any given month for as long as they’ve been tracking it:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OhRv

How does that delta compare to people who didn’t go to college?

Most college graduates seem not to fully appreciate just how shitty things have gotten for the non-grads in the past 30 years.

By this logic fat shaming is acceptable?

I mean, yeah, in many contexts. For example, when a professional athlete shows up to training camp after putting on a bunch of fat in the off-season, that’s fair game. It’s literally their job to maintain their bodies and if we’re allowed to criticize their job performance then we’re certainly allowed to criticize their maintenance of their physical fitness. There’s obviously a clear parallel here between that and other public figures where their intelligence may be fair game for criticism.

More broadly, when people are engaged in unhealthy habits of any kind (from smoking to sleep deprivation to overwork/stress to terrible relationship decisions to unhealthy eating/exercise habits), I think it’s fair game for loved ones to point that out and encourage steering their lives back towards healthier choices. I’m not advocating that we go and make fun of strangers, the range of acceptable conversation in our day to day relationships is going to be different.

No, that’s not OK to mock people’s medical conditions, and it’s always a good idea to exercise some empathy and humility to know that things might not always be as easy for others as for yourself. But I’ve never been on board with the idea that fatness is somehow off limits, in large part that I don’t believe that most people’s fatness is inherently innate. Correlations between moving to or away from high obesity areas (most notably between countries or between significant changes of altitude, but also apparent in moves between city centers and suburban car-based communities) make that obvious that fatness is often environmental.

TLDR: I make fun of Trump’s fat ass all the time.

But because intelligence is an inherited trait

I don’t think this is true, practically speaking. Intelligence is like endurance running speed in that there are heritable components to it, but at the end of the day environmental factors dominate on who is or isn’t faster than another.

I can make fun of someone for being dumb in the same way that I can make fun of someone for being a slow runner. It’s only problematic when their slowness is actually caused by something out of their control, like some kind of health issue.

Yeah, circumcision is near universal in Muslim-majority countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision

Allah = God (Islamic)

Are you under the impression that Muslims don’t circumcize? In many Muslim societies, they make sure the boys are old enough to remember the mutilation, with circumcision around the age of 7.

I don’t like the methodology of the study (done by Oxfam if you want to look it up). It attributes emissions to a person when it is done by a company they’re invested in. From the press release:

Billionaires’ lifestyle emissions dwarf those of ordinary people, but the emissions from their investments are dramatically higher still —the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined. Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.

Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. On average, a billionaire’s investment portfolio is almost twice as polluting as an investment in the S&P 500. However, if their investments were in a low-carbon-intensity investment fund, their investment emissions would be 13 times lower.

I’m of the opinion that we should look at people’s consumption behavior rather than their production behavior. When Exxon Mobil or Delta Airlines pollute, they’re doing it for their customers. Reducing the consumption from the customer point of view does reduce the overall emissions, so I’m gonna continue to reduce my own contributions to this crisis.

The fundamental difference between Chinese commune policies and, say, American sharecropping or Cuban sugar plantations is that the workers had no title to their land, not that they couldn’t leave it.

I’m not talking about Chinese commune policies. I’m talking about the hukou system, and its effects on how children were raised in China between 1990 and 2010. As in, the lived experiences of Chinese people between the ages of 15 and 40 today.

It’s absolutely relevant to people today, not least of which was the original comment you were responding to, a firsthand experience of what happened to that commenter’s migrant family in Guangzhou as recently as 2010.

It’s weird to raise this as a concern relative to the history prior to the revolutionary era.

It’s different because this affected the people who are still alive today.

The reform being talked about started in 1980, and didn’t become available to the broader population until pretty recently. Even today, children aren’t allowed to attend public schools outside of their ancestral home town.

So if you were born in 2000 to parents who had moved to Shenzhen, they’d still have to send you back to whatever rural village your grandparents were from, and didn’t have access to schools or healthcare otherwise. Now, you’re 25 years old and lived most of your life seeing your parents once a year, and still have an internal passport-like document tying you to that ancestral village.

There are more reforms on the horizon, but trying to explain just how pervasive the hukou system still is (and how much it affected the people who are alive today) is really hard to grasp for people not familiar with the system.

Honestly, the space race part of it isn’t concerning to me at all. The fact that it’s between billionaire-backed companies is several policy failures, though.

NASA has traditionally relied heavily on defense/space contractors. The space shuttle was built by Rockwell International (which was eventually acquired by Boeing).

The Saturn V rocket that took people to the moon was manufactured by Boeing, Douglas (which became part of McDonnell Douglas, which was acquired by Boeing), and North American (which got acquired by Rockwell, which was acquired by Boeing).

But through consolidation in the American aerospace industry, the bloated behemoth that is modern Boeing has serious issues holding it back. And so the rise of new competition against Boeing is generally a good thing!

Except the only companies that were started up to compete with Boeing were funded largely as ego projects by billionaires who made so much money in other fields that they have excess billions to throw around.

NASA’s new approach to contracting is fine, too: basically promising prizes to companies that hit milestones, which put the risk (and potential reward) on the private companies. Then, once SpaceX did demonstrate feasibility, NASA switched to fixed price contracts for a lot of the programs and did save a ton of money compared to previous cost-plus contract pricing. It’s unclear whether other space companies can deliver services at prices competitive with SpaceX, but their attempts at least force SpaceX to bid lower prices.

Ideally, we would’ve retained a competitive aerospace industry in the past few decades, and a bunch of companies would be competing with each other to continue delivering space services to NASA and other space agencies (and private sector customers that might want satellite stuff). And these companies would be big corporate entities where the major shareholders aren’t exactly household names (like Boeing today).

The way Bezos and Musk became billionaires would be a problem even if they didn’t try to go to space. The way they’re trying to go to space doesn’t really move the needle much, in my opinion.

When a team loses a basketball game by 1 point, literally every missed shot or turnover (or blown defensive coverage leading to an easy basket for the other side or foul leading to made free throws) could be pointed to as the “cause” of that loss.

So yeah, if she were an actual better politician she probably would’ve won with the cards she was dealt. But there were also dozens of other causes that would’ve made her (or an alternative candidate) win, all else being equal.

And it’s hard to see how a better politician would’ve ended up in that position to begin with. The circumstances of how Harris ended up as VP probably wouldn’t have happened if not for the specific way that her 2020 campaign flamed out.

I’m not as pessimistic as you about the future, and I don’t think of today’s children as people passively experiencing things that happen in the world. They’re participants, and they’ll have a lot more agency about their futures during our lifetimes.

Politically, I still think that fascism is brittle. Competence is actively discouraged (independently competent people are minimized to prevent threats to centralized power), so I think any fascist system is bound to fail when the people actively resist.

Economically, the business cycle ebbs and flows, and whoever’s on top today might not be on top tomorrow. I believe the current economic system is dominated by bubbles that have no future, so we’re gonna see some future chaos where new bases of power will rise. Good guys can win in those scenarios, and those good guys may very well be my own children.

Culturally, nothing is permanent. Trying to predict things is a fool’s errand. Better to just prepare our children for resilience through flexibility and adaptability, and raise them to be kind, well adjusted, socially plugged in.

Living a good life is possible even in a bad world. That’s happened throughout human history. And so if people want to raise children, let them.

Just want people to think a bit further than mid-19th century definions and analysis which I think no longer hold.

Yeah, one of the things that really shaped my views on fairness in wealth distribution was studying corporate law (and the legal cases that shaped what Delaware corporate law is today). That history adds a lot of complexity to figuring out who is the “owner” class and who is the “labor” class. Highly compensated executives often have their shareholders over a barrel, and the legal system is designed to protect management from shareholders, so long as the corporation makes some minimal token gestures towards shareholder value. In practice, shareholders have very limited means of controlling a corporation (mainly by electing directors, who tend to be officers/managers of other companies and sympathize with managers and give quite a bit of leeway when only part time supervising the officers they often play golf with).

And we can see this play out in the modern era. We have a bunch of wannabe finance bros, hopeful future millionaires, talking about financial topics and cheerleading their heroes (CEOs and founders), often being willing marks in financial investment scams. They believe that holding capital will help them survive further divergence between the haves and the have nots, but history shows that when push comes to shove, only power matters. No amount of accumulated wealth can protect against power, and those with power can always use that power to enrich themselves.

So I don’t find it particularly useful to draw bright lines on who is or isn’t the enemy based on their financial situation. We should recognize the power structures themselves, and how power is exercised (politically, financially, legally, culturally, and the old standby, violently), and work to influence things through those levers (including the power to change the levers themselves).

Budgets are approved every two years, so it just means people will lose their coverage in one year.

The budget process is an annual process. Not sure where you’re getting the idea that it’s a 2-year budget.

There are 2-year appropriations, but that’s less common than the default 1-year. There are also other multi year appropriations and no-year appropriations that don’t expire at all (agencies can spend the money until it’s gone, however long it takes). You can read about those here.

Either way, though, Congress needs to pass a budget every year (or at least continuing resolutions).

It’s a couple of different factors at play:

• Sales of this particular product are up and Fox News, the largest and most influential conservative media source, ran a story about it as if it’s a sign of the nostalgic return of something today’s old people remember from their youth.
• Most younger people correctly recognize that this trash is actually a bad sign for the economy, because it reflects a shift down market where people are opting to make this stuff instead of the more expensive option of restaurants or takeout.
• Consistent with worsening economic conditions, the price of beef in the United States is skyrocketing, so that the product itself is changing the label to recommend replacing the beef (which customers would ordinarily buy separately) with something else, like cheaper hot dogs.

The political and economic discussion is happening in the United States, and that generally means that it spills out onto the internet where national borders are less significant for where conversations might end up.

How long before we see that in the States?

We’re about 5 days away from federal food assistance being canceled for the month of November, so less than a week, maybe?

I mean today ICE even tear gassed a bunch of Chicago cops who were trying to clear a path out for them. The ICE thugs are cowards and will turn on local police in a heartbeat. (See also capitol police beaten on Jan 6.)

People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.

Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.

Yup. That’s the playbook. DDoS this service by:

• Generating fake tweets and reporting them.
• Volunteering to fact check and do a bad job, actively sabotaging their data.
• Gathering information to doxx the people who run the site.

Bonus points for turning the wrath of this mob against MAGA types themselves.

The listeria outbreak also exposed Boar’s Head as a deeply mismanaged company. When the CFO, who had been at the company for over 20 years, was deposed under oath, he couldn’t answer the question of who the CEO was, or who his boss was. It came up in a lawsuit between family members of the family that owns and controls the company, and has their own competing factions in charge of different parts of the company.

From a pure corporate governance perspective, that type of dysfunction is a recipe for disaster.