Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
KIROKAZE
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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JVL
Three Goblin Art
tumblr dot com
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
todays bird
DEAR READER
ojovivo
art blog(derogatory)
Kiana Khansmith
Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Keni
⁂
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@jadagul
The archons want you to feel poor. You can't let them. It's like stoicism how you feel is the one thing you can control. Boarding group 9 gets there just as fast as boarding groups 1-8!
the psychological wage of not being in the last boarding group tho
Boarding last is a privilege! That means you don't have to spend as much time on the plane.
I often have a lot of sympathy for the Lame Stodgy Sensible Center-Left types, but - it is hard to maintain much of that sympathy when I see them posting sneering takes about how only an idiot could fail to support important ideas like (ahem) "teen curfew zones."
Are you seeing this opinion often?
Outside of elderly mall goers, that is.
Matt Yglesias in recent weeks, notably.
To be fair we have had a serious problem with organized-crime gangs of teenagers. (And sometimes preteens!)
This sounds like a shitpost, but as I understand it, DC started charging people under 16 very leniently (good!) but then various criminal organizations responded to incentives (predictable!) and started specifically recruiting 14-year-olds to do carjackings because they would basically never get in serious trouble for it.
I think that specific problem has abated somewhat, but it did require a certain amount of targeted enforcement in response. I haven't looked into details but I assume the same thing is going on with the teen curfew—there's a specific uptick in violence and vandalism that they're trying to get under control.
(I viscerally hate the idea of curfews. I also viscerally hate the idea of jail. The latter is definitely sometimes necessary.)
probably for the first time in American history the biden admin explicitly pursued a policy of full employment and the reaction of everyone—from the right to the left—was “this fucking sucks.” now, for some people this was because their doordash didn’t remain perpetually cheap; for others it was because this did not fix literally every single problem in the american economy overnight. but I am willing to go on record and say actually yeah I think pursuing full employment is good, more governments should do that, this policy did in fact meaningfully reverse trends in inequality, and if we’re going to relentlessly undercut policies we nominally support because they don’t fix absolutely everything immediately, we are rapidly going to make those policies unviable. i do not in fact want to make progressive and lefty economic policy unviable!
and the trouble with economic stuff is that it’s a hive of low-trust sentiment that gets reflexively applied based on affective criteria—“full employment rules actually” becomes seen as an endorsement of Biden as a person or a politician. cynicism and bitterness become an in-group marker for online lefty politics. I get why affect and boundary maintenance are important in politics, but I care about policy, about hard nosed material reality, and if we are going to let affect and cynicism overrule policy we will never in fact make the world any different.
It is unfortunate that most of the left perspective Biden administration postmortems don't discuss his serious economic gains. I still hold that Bidenomics would have been a stronger platform for Democrats if they had anyone in the administration who was able and willing to reach American people wrt the economy (excluding maybe Lina Khan).
I mean absolutely fault them for having a lousy communications strategy but we must also place some of the blame on the sort of people who insist the Biden economy was terrible and when people responded by posting graphs of data that showed it wasn’t responded with death threats. like. There is a real strain of antintellectualism and social media toxicity in the discourse here you cannot lay at the feet of the White House’s communications strategy.
I may be remembering the timeline wrong, but ‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that.
the fed trying fight inflation popped the pandemic WFH boom economy but didn’t slow the degree to which it felt like prices were climbing, even on non-luxury categories like basic groceries, rent, etc.
that said, the Biden years weren’t too bad in the big scheme of things, and it was truly bizarre to me how bad they were at getting the word out. 24 hour cable news cycle of Democratic Party / centrist-liberal leaning people and my coworkers were learning about this or that Biden policy from fringe weirdos on twitter rather via me sharing stuff I’d read, rather than from TV
what was Rachel Maddow doing for that 4 years?
real median household income 2019: 83,260 2020: 81,580 2021: 81,270 2022: 79,500 2023: 82,690 2024: 83,730 cpi 2019: 1.81 2020: 1.23 2021: 4.70 2022: 8.00 2023: 4.12 prime age employment to population ratio: 2019: rises slowly from 79.8 to 80.4 2020: peaks at 80.6 in Jan, bottoms out at 69.6 in April 2021: rises steadily to 79.2 2022: around 80 most of the year, ends at 80.2 in dec 2023: around 81 most of the year, ends at 80.5 in dec 2024: around 80.5 most of the year (where it has roughly stayed since) real personal consumption: 2019: 13,948 2020: 13,597 2021: 14,792 2022: 15,237 2023: 15,628 2024: 16,089 (for all of these i googled "FRED" + the statistic in question, if you want to check my numbers)
the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.
and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.
is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?
maybe! but for all those explanations i would say the label "vibecession" is roughly appropriate, and the claim that "the economy really was worse in 23 and 24" is not, when applied generally, actually true. it was certainly worse for people dependent on the expanded CTC! is that enough to explain the general decline in sentiment, or the fact that people tended to report in surveys that they personally were doing fine (even their state was doing fine) but that the american economy in general was doing poorly, according to their perception? i am open to this explanation, but i will confess i am very skeptical, and i don't think people who advocate for this explanation have the data to really back that claim up!
So there's a theory I've seen bouncing around that I feel like I really should go poke at data and think about
But e.g. this post by Mike Konczal argues that the prices of essentials and housing have gone up faster than inflation, and those are a bigger share of expenditures (and stress!) for people toward the bottom of the distribution; so even if "inflation"-adjusted wages have gone up, they might be under more pressure because their basket of goods has had its price go up faster than inflation.
And every time I've heard this suggestion, my first reaction has been skepticism, because I'm pretty sure I remember reading analyses that if you break out baskets of goods for different income levels, inflation has been lower than average for the bottom quartile or so, meaning that they've been doing better than "real wages" make it look.
(This is possible if luxury goods are rising faster than inflation; the "average basket" goes up by 3%, but the cheap stuff only goes up by 2% while the expensive stuff goes up by 4%.)
But of course I remember reading this a while ago, like before the pandemic. And if that's true, but Konczal's post is true, that would explain a lot, right? The explanation would go something like
In the 2010s, wages in the bottom quartile weren't rising faster than inflation. But they were rising faster than the expenses people in the bottom quartile actually had, so their experienced living standards were improving. After covid, wages in the bottom quartile have risen faster than average inflation, but the prices of things people in the bottom quartile [need to] buy have risen even faster, so their experience living standards have fallen.
I don't know if this is true, and it would require doing some detailed data analysis that I'm realistically not going to do. Idea free to an econ grad student looking for a paper idea.
I mean isn’t one reason expenditure on housing has gone up because Americans in general want bigger, nicer single family homes? Like if you look at the data there are specific metro areas that are spectacularly unaffordable (hello bay area), but also the square footage of housing has been steadily climbing—this is on the one hand not necessarily an intractable problem, especially if we build a ton more housing, and it is good if people can afford better and nicer homes, especially as a result of having less of their income eaten up by other things. But esp outside specific metros with a housing shortage it’s kind of a complicated picture wrt why housing prices are rising in the way that they are.
Absolutely complicated, and absolutely the average housing size and quality has gone up. But the expected housing size, and the minimum allowed housing size, have also gone up, right? And if we're looking at vibes and expectations, we should be asking at least somewhat how people are doing relative to those expectations and those minima.
Now again, I'm not saying this did happen. I don't have any data and haven't looked for it. But if this is true, then it would explain a lot—if the average growth has gone up, but the bottom third has shifted from above average to below average, then a whole bunch of people would feel worse and more insecure without the average numbers being wrong.
Looks like Arin Dube (using data from Xavier Jaravel) went ahead and did this.
Between 2019 and 2024, inflation was 23.8% in the bottom decile and just 20.4% in the top decile. So it is true (by these figures, there are a lot of modeling assumptions in any calculation like this) that inflation is hitting the bottom harder than the top, although not hyper-dramatically.
Then Dube does some other corrections I can't quite follow without digging in a lot more, for the fact that low-wage workers aren't the same as low-income households. And his conclusion is that naively, bottom-decile real wage growth is 8.4 percentage points faster than top-decile wage growth. After adjusting for decile-differential inflation, it's 7.1 points faster. Without the second round of corrections, it would have been 5.5 points faster.
If we believe these figures, the bottom isn't doing quite as well in real-wage terms as the naive figures make it look, but it's still doing better than the top, so this probably isn't an explanation.
(On the other hand, see Matt Bruenig today arguing that the recent inequality compression is basically fake. Which does raise interesting philosophical questions to me about the relative merits of wage compression and income compression.)
its really cool that we discovered glass which is the material that doesnt have any chemical reactions with anything in the universe very useful for doing chemistry due to being able to put things in it to contain chemical reactions and never having it react with the things that are in it due to it being completely and entirely unreactive to every chemical
Posts from a 17th century chymist who's about to have their bones dissolved by hydrofluoric acid.
HYDROFLUORIC ACID MENTION‼️
💀🧪
DICKS OUT FOR HYDROFLUORIC ACID!!!
NOT A GOOD IDEA!!!!!
When I was a kid, I read a series of books about a character named Einstein Anderson; they were basically Encyclopedia Brown but for science instead of crime. Adam "Einstein" Anderson is a science nerd middle schooler, and every book has like ten short-story mysteries where the resolution depends on some basic fact about science, engineering, mechanics, etc. (For instance, one turns on the fact that it's impossible to bend over and touch your toes while standing with your heels and butt flush against a wall, for center-of-mass reasons.)
One of the stories I remember features Einstein Anderson's rival Stanley claiming he's invented a "universal solvent". He takes Einstein to his lab and shows off all the different things that dissolve in the liquid and claims it can dissolve anything. and Einstein responds that first, it's not a universal solvent, and second, that Stanley "would be in a lot of trouble if he did".
And the resolution, of course, is that Stanley is storing the "universal solvent" in a glass beaker, and if it were truly universal it would also dissolve the beaker.
Aside from residential zoning/real estate and farm subsidies my most distinctly libertarian instinct is probably pro sports teams. The industry makes how much? And they want how many million dollars from the city to build and upkeep their fancy stadiums? fuck off. Live by the market and die by the market.
You know how leftists, social democrats, and even some centrists tell you that the mail and the welfare state and public infrastructure don't need to turn a profit? It's actually fine when the local library "loses money". It's for the people. It's a service paid for with tax money.
This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.
And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.
These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.
Maybe the way to get people to understand why we pay taxes and why we should have libraries is to make an analogy to sports arenas. Those are popular!
I hate that last suggestion but it might be right!
ive been varying degrees of familiar with differential forms for like 6 years now and i still dont understand why anybody cares about them. like. sure. if youre a physicist or whatever, you wanna use stokes's theorem. but you dont really need differential forms to USE it. just move the d's around
Do you have another way of expressing integration on abstract manifolds that you prefer? Like I think it's quite natural that you'd need some sort of gadget to express the fact that, say, the function that's constantly 1 gives different integrals on spheres of different radii, even though they are diffeomorphic.
If the manifolds are all embedded in R^3 (or, presumably, R^n) you can just give a parametrization; that's how Calc 3 handles it. I get the impression you only "need" differential forms if you want to move to something much more abstract? But they also give a unifying framework for understanding why the parametrization stuff works.
i think this is pretty revealing re: Trump's whole deal - you see it come out other times too, like when he said Zohran could call him a fascist if he wanted in front of the press. i think this is why he has a reputation for "honesty" among his supporters, despite being a chronic liar - he understands political communication as a tool to signal different things to different people, with the actual truth value of what you say being irrelevant. i think this is true of a lot of politicians, but what distinguishes Trump is that he doesn't feel compelled to maintain kayfabe and will freely acknowledge it. remember this?
a lot of Trump's appeal is that he's very direct about the fact that he's a bad person! when reporters or other politicians confront him about this, he's not mad at the implication that he's corrupt or dishonest or amoral - he is those things, and he's proud of it, and it's part of his brand - he is mad (or pretending to be mad) that they are signaling defiance. he doesn't care if you think he's a piece of shit, he just doesn't want you to express it in a way that threatens him.
Politician-style dishonesty means a lot of Nice Lady Therapist style “lying” by eg. Never getting caught on a hotmic calling a country with a very low average in “a shithole” let alone calling a country a shithole to the faces of its leaders. Instead it’s “a developing country facing challenges” and “economically disadvantaged” and some such. It’s easy for someone like Trump to be “honest” by calling a shithole a shithole when he’s the only person in politics who’s willing to call shitholes shitholes (and able to get away with doing so. Trump’s ability to leverage his blunt phrasing didn’t change the need for everyone else to parse words.)
Like, the “joke” that’s older than any of us is “how can you tell when a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.” With Trump, at least he’s a certain type of honest.
i mean i also think there's also a right wing pathology that imagines itself as part of a "silent majority" that is being repressed by political correctness or woke or whatever and cannot really conceive of the fact that others disagree with them on substance as well as presentation - i think there are plenty of people (and some politicians) who would object to the "shithole countries" remark as being a blinkered and inarticulate way of looking at the world, beyond just being impolite. laundering Trump's cruelty through the "he tells it like it is" cliche ignores the part where he is very frequently wrong about "how it is"
Yeah, the part of this that's "honest" is that traditionally politicians who think "shithole countries" are supposed to say something else. He tells you how he feels (in the moment, subject to change at any time) not how it is.
Joseph Heath suggested that when people praise Trump's "honesty" what they really mean is his lack of inhibition.
We live in a world where the professional upper-middle-class prides itself, greatly, on self-control, restraint, moderation. (It's me, I'm the professional upper-middle-class.) We sit quietly in meetings and on the train. We avoid offensive language. We believe the claims of expert consensus rather than the first thing that comes to mind. We read medium-length documents to the end We engage System 2 to override System 1.
(Or rather, we aspire to all these things, and we praise people who do them and condemn people who don't. Obviously there are many failures to achieve this and you can list them as well as I can.)
Trump doesn't do any of that. Trump is loud, he is rude, he is dismissive, he leans into his intuition at the expense of considered judgment. And if you're sick of our high-impulse-control elites (like basically everyone who is voluntarily reading extended text analyses on the internet), it can be refreshing that Trump is clearly not one of them.
probably for the first time in American history the biden admin explicitly pursued a policy of full employment and the reaction of everyone—from the right to the left—was “this fucking sucks.” now, for some people this was because their doordash didn’t remain perpetually cheap; for others it was because this did not fix literally every single problem in the american economy overnight. but I am willing to go on record and say actually yeah I think pursuing full employment is good, more governments should do that, this policy did in fact meaningfully reverse trends in inequality, and if we’re going to relentlessly undercut policies we nominally support because they don’t fix absolutely everything immediately, we are rapidly going to make those policies unviable. i do not in fact want to make progressive and lefty economic policy unviable!
and the trouble with economic stuff is that it’s a hive of low-trust sentiment that gets reflexively applied based on affective criteria—“full employment rules actually” becomes seen as an endorsement of Biden as a person or a politician. cynicism and bitterness become an in-group marker for online lefty politics. I get why affect and boundary maintenance are important in politics, but I care about policy, about hard nosed material reality, and if we are going to let affect and cynicism overrule policy we will never in fact make the world any different.
It is unfortunate that most of the left perspective Biden administration postmortems don't discuss his serious economic gains. I still hold that Bidenomics would have been a stronger platform for Democrats if they had anyone in the administration who was able and willing to reach American people wrt the economy (excluding maybe Lina Khan).
I mean absolutely fault them for having a lousy communications strategy but we must also place some of the blame on the sort of people who insist the Biden economy was terrible and when people responded by posting graphs of data that showed it wasn’t responded with death threats. like. There is a real strain of antintellectualism and social media toxicity in the discourse here you cannot lay at the feet of the White House’s communications strategy.
I may be remembering the timeline wrong, but ‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that.
the fed trying fight inflation popped the pandemic WFH boom economy but didn’t slow the degree to which it felt like prices were climbing, even on non-luxury categories like basic groceries, rent, etc.
that said, the Biden years weren’t too bad in the big scheme of things, and it was truly bizarre to me how bad they were at getting the word out. 24 hour cable news cycle of Democratic Party / centrist-liberal leaning people and my coworkers were learning about this or that Biden policy from fringe weirdos on twitter rather via me sharing stuff I’d read, rather than from TV
what was Rachel Maddow doing for that 4 years?
real median household income 2019: 83,260 2020: 81,580 2021: 81,270 2022: 79,500 2023: 82,690 2024: 83,730 cpi 2019: 1.81 2020: 1.23 2021: 4.70 2022: 8.00 2023: 4.12 prime age employment to population ratio: 2019: rises slowly from 79.8 to 80.4 2020: peaks at 80.6 in Jan, bottoms out at 69.6 in April 2021: rises steadily to 79.2 2022: around 80 most of the year, ends at 80.2 in dec 2023: around 81 most of the year, ends at 80.5 in dec 2024: around 80.5 most of the year (where it has roughly stayed since) real personal consumption: 2019: 13,948 2020: 13,597 2021: 14,792 2022: 15,237 2023: 15,628 2024: 16,089 (for all of these i googled "FRED" + the statistic in question, if you want to check my numbers)
the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.
and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.
is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?
maybe! but for all those explanations i would say the label "vibecession" is roughly appropriate, and the claim that "the economy really was worse in 23 and 24" is not, when applied generally, actually true. it was certainly worse for people dependent on the expanded CTC! is that enough to explain the general decline in sentiment, or the fact that people tended to report in surveys that they personally were doing fine (even their state was doing fine) but that the american economy in general was doing poorly, according to their perception? i am open to this explanation, but i will confess i am very skeptical, and i don't think people who advocate for this explanation have the data to really back that claim up!
So there's a theory I've seen bouncing around that I feel like I really should go poke at data and think about
But e.g. this post by Mike Konczal argues that the prices of essentials and housing have gone up faster than inflation, and those are a bigger share of expenditures (and stress!) for people toward the bottom of the distribution; so even if "inflation"-adjusted wages have gone up, they might be under more pressure because their basket of goods has had its price go up faster than inflation.
And every time I've heard this suggestion, my first reaction has been skepticism, because I'm pretty sure I remember reading analyses that if you break out baskets of goods for different income levels, inflation has been lower than average for the bottom quartile or so, meaning that they've been doing better than "real wages" make it look.
(This is possible if luxury goods are rising faster than inflation; the "average basket" goes up by 3%, but the cheap stuff only goes up by 2% while the expensive stuff goes up by 4%.)
But of course I remember reading this a while ago, like before the pandemic. And if that's true, but Konczal's post is true, that would explain a lot, right? The explanation would go something like
In the 2010s, wages in the bottom quartile weren't rising faster than inflation. But they were rising faster than the expenses people in the bottom quartile actually had, so their experienced living standards were improving. After covid, wages in the bottom quartile have risen faster than average inflation, but the prices of things people in the bottom quartile [need to] buy have risen even faster, so their experience living standards have fallen.
I don't know if this is true, and it would require doing some detailed data analysis that I'm realistically not going to do. Idea free to an econ grad student looking for a paper idea.
I mean isn’t one reason expenditure on housing has gone up because Americans in general want bigger, nicer single family homes? Like if you look at the data there are specific metro areas that are spectacularly unaffordable (hello bay area), but also the square footage of housing has been steadily climbing—this is on the one hand not necessarily an intractable problem, especially if we build a ton more housing, and it is good if people can afford better and nicer homes, especially as a result of having less of their income eaten up by other things. But esp outside specific metros with a housing shortage it’s kind of a complicated picture wrt why housing prices are rising in the way that they are.
Absolutely complicated, and absolutely the average housing size and quality has gone up. But the expected housing size, and the minimum allowed housing size, have also gone up, right? And if we're looking at vibes and expectations, we should be asking at least somewhat how people are doing relative to those expectations and those minima.
Now again, I'm not saying this did happen. I don't have any data and haven't looked for it. But if this is true, then it would explain a lot—if the average growth has gone up, but the bottom third has shifted from above average to below average, then a whole bunch of people would feel worse and more insecure without the average numbers being wrong.
Worldbuilding idea from me and @jadagul:
Like in Percy Jackson, the Olympian gods are real, but are being forced to maintain a Masquerade to keep some greater threats down. Maybe elements of the Masquerade are forming the metaphysical bars to Tartarus. So, the Titans and their minions have obvious incentives to make a mess and make people believe in the gods again, so they can break free, and the Olympians are having to put down massive crises while pretending they're not divine.
The extension, then, is that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are total fakes. The Olympians picked a minor Levantine religion and elevated it to the point that it completely displaced their native faith. Jesus healing the sick? Asclepius. Jesus multiplying the fish? Poseidon.
There's been at least one Olympian in an organizational role at the Vatican since the very beginning. (And for a couple hundred years, Dionysus did the job, but it got kind of out of hand).
The deception was fantastically successful, and the Olympian gods are still super bitter about being forced to pretend they're fake.
probably for the first time in American history the biden admin explicitly pursued a policy of full employment and the reaction of everyone—from the right to the left—was “this fucking sucks.” now, for some people this was because their doordash didn’t remain perpetually cheap; for others it was because this did not fix literally every single problem in the american economy overnight. but I am willing to go on record and say actually yeah I think pursuing full employment is good, more governments should do that, this policy did in fact meaningfully reverse trends in inequality, and if we’re going to relentlessly undercut policies we nominally support because they don’t fix absolutely everything immediately, we are rapidly going to make those policies unviable. i do not in fact want to make progressive and lefty economic policy unviable!
and the trouble with economic stuff is that it’s a hive of low-trust sentiment that gets reflexively applied based on affective criteria—“full employment rules actually” becomes seen as an endorsement of Biden as a person or a politician. cynicism and bitterness become an in-group marker for online lefty politics. I get why affect and boundary maintenance are important in politics, but I care about policy, about hard nosed material reality, and if we are going to let affect and cynicism overrule policy we will never in fact make the world any different.
It is unfortunate that most of the left perspective Biden administration postmortems don't discuss his serious economic gains. I still hold that Bidenomics would have been a stronger platform for Democrats if they had anyone in the administration who was able and willing to reach American people wrt the economy (excluding maybe Lina Khan).
I mean absolutely fault them for having a lousy communications strategy but we must also place some of the blame on the sort of people who insist the Biden economy was terrible and when people responded by posting graphs of data that showed it wasn’t responded with death threats. like. There is a real strain of antintellectualism and social media toxicity in the discourse here you cannot lay at the feet of the White House’s communications strategy.
I may be remembering the timeline wrong, but ‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that.
the fed trying fight inflation popped the pandemic WFH boom economy but didn’t slow the degree to which it felt like prices were climbing, even on non-luxury categories like basic groceries, rent, etc.
that said, the Biden years weren’t too bad in the big scheme of things, and it was truly bizarre to me how bad they were at getting the word out. 24 hour cable news cycle of Democratic Party / centrist-liberal leaning people and my coworkers were learning about this or that Biden policy from fringe weirdos on twitter rather via me sharing stuff I’d read, rather than from TV
what was Rachel Maddow doing for that 4 years?
real median household income 2019: 83,260 2020: 81,580 2021: 81,270 2022: 79,500 2023: 82,690 2024: 83,730 cpi 2019: 1.81 2020: 1.23 2021: 4.70 2022: 8.00 2023: 4.12 prime age employment to population ratio: 2019: rises slowly from 79.8 to 80.4 2020: peaks at 80.6 in Jan, bottoms out at 69.6 in April 2021: rises steadily to 79.2 2022: around 80 most of the year, ends at 80.2 in dec 2023: around 81 most of the year, ends at 80.5 in dec 2024: around 80.5 most of the year (where it has roughly stayed since) real personal consumption: 2019: 13,948 2020: 13,597 2021: 14,792 2022: 15,237 2023: 15,628 2024: 16,089 (for all of these i googled "FRED" + the statistic in question, if you want to check my numbers)
the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.
and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.
is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?
maybe! but for all those explanations i would say the label "vibecession" is roughly appropriate, and the claim that "the economy really was worse in 23 and 24" is not, when applied generally, actually true. it was certainly worse for people dependent on the expanded CTC! is that enough to explain the general decline in sentiment, or the fact that people tended to report in surveys that they personally were doing fine (even their state was doing fine) but that the american economy in general was doing poorly, according to their perception? i am open to this explanation, but i will confess i am very skeptical, and i don't think people who advocate for this explanation have the data to really back that claim up!
So there's a theory I've seen bouncing around that I feel like I really should go poke at data and think about
But e.g. this post by Mike Konczal argues that the prices of essentials and housing have gone up faster than inflation, and those are a bigger share of expenditures (and stress!) for people toward the bottom of the distribution; so even if "inflation"-adjusted wages have gone up, they might be under more pressure because their basket of goods has had its price go up faster than inflation.
And every time I've heard this suggestion, my first reaction has been skepticism, because I'm pretty sure I remember reading analyses that if you break out baskets of goods for different income levels, inflation has been lower than average for the bottom quartile or so, meaning that they've been doing better than "real wages" make it look.
(This is possible if luxury goods are rising faster than inflation; the "average basket" goes up by 3%, but the cheap stuff only goes up by 2% while the expensive stuff goes up by 4%.)
But of course I remember reading this a while ago, like before the pandemic. And if that's true, but Konczal's post is true, that would explain a lot, right? The explanation would go something like
In the 2010s, wages in the bottom quartile weren't rising faster than inflation. But they were rising faster than the expenses people in the bottom quartile actually had, so their experienced living standards were improving. After covid, wages in the bottom quartile have risen faster than average inflation, but the prices of things people in the bottom quartile [need to] buy have risen even faster, so their experience living standards have fallen.
I don't know if this is true, and it would require doing some detailed data analysis that I'm realistically not going to do. Idea free to an econ grad student looking for a paper idea.
hot take but as much as "stop reinventing the wheel in UI" would help, screenreader accessibility is always going to be a clusterfuck until they have a platform-independent standard and developers have access to open implementations of that standard on their target platforms. like of course that won't fix anything by itself, but it seems like a precondition of any durable solution. it's an inherently hard problem since most screenreaders are also trying to help you navigate OS GUIs, but my god, it's such a 1990s-ass software ecosystem. at this rate the way things will ultimately get sorted out is that everything turns into a website and then the W3C issues a papal bull
honestly I think a lot of the problem comes from a half-finished transfer of accessibility responsibilities that's left everyone dissatisfied
like historically the norm was that nobody in conventional development really cared or thought about blind users, notwithstanding a few heroic efforts, so as a screenreader vendor you were building a mediation layer from scratch, like hiring out armed escorts and local guides for people travelling through hostile territory. eventually OS manufacturers gave it some real attention, but it never really made it to third-party developers, and a lot of those standards have been abandoned or inconsistently enforced in the same way every other OS UX convention has decayed.
in principle, keeping up with changes should be the job of the companies who build these sophisticated mediation layers, but these days that's not really feasible, especially when a modern system may have 4-8 incompatible GUI paradigms rubbing elbows. so now we're trying to displace the responsibility of maintaining compatibility with old tooling onto a million random developers building a million random things, even though it's all happening on top of this same messy, inconsistent, out-of-date foundation. These are the same people who broke graphical UX norms without any standard to replace them! It just ain't gonna work man
Went to a talk at JMM about making materials for math courses that satisfy current DOE guidelines for accessibility
And one of the things that came up is that we by default produce all of our materials in PDF format, and those aren't screen reader-accessible.
And there are a couple projects to produce screen reader-accessible PDFs, but it is not actually possible to succeed because the different screen readers don't agree on what they want a PDF to look like to be read correctly.
yeah this is very is similar to how my adventure in "I should make this PDF accessible" ended, though I'd imagine it's a lot worse for math since PDFs are hellish for structured text. and like, you notice that this is all much easier on the web, because on the web you just don't have to think or care about that shit, you are doing aria labelling and WCAG compliance and if the screenreaders still do the wrong thing after that, it's their problem
Yeah the "correct" solution seems to be compiling LaTeX to HTML rather than to PDF. But it sucks because the tooling and the training is all mostly focused on PDF output, and you can't just take a file written to compile to PDF and compile it to HTML instead—especially not if you want it to be compliant! Each feature needs to have compliance specifically written for it, and LaTeX has accumulated a lot of features.
Things like PreTeXt work but you have to rewrite all your files to fit their requirements.
hot take but as much as "stop reinventing the wheel in UI" would help, screenreader accessibility is always going to be a clusterfuck until they have a platform-independent standard and developers have access to open implementations of that standard on their target platforms. like of course that won't fix anything by itself, but it seems like a precondition of any durable solution. it's an inherently hard problem since most screenreaders are also trying to help you navigate OS GUIs, but my god, it's such a 1990s-ass software ecosystem. at this rate the way things will ultimately get sorted out is that everything turns into a website and then the W3C issues a papal bull
honestly I think a lot of the problem comes from a half-finished transfer of accessibility responsibilities that's left everyone dissatisfied
like historically the norm was that nobody in conventional development really cared or thought about blind users, notwithstanding a few heroic efforts, so as a screenreader vendor you were building a mediation layer from scratch, like hiring out armed escorts and local guides for people travelling through hostile territory. eventually OS manufacturers gave it some real attention, but it never really made it to third-party developers, and a lot of those standards have been abandoned or inconsistently enforced in the same way every other OS UX convention has decayed.
in principle, keeping up with changes should be the job of the companies who build these sophisticated mediation layers, but these days that's not really feasible, especially when a modern system may have 4-8 incompatible GUI paradigms rubbing elbows. so now we're trying to displace the responsibility of maintaining compatibility with old tooling onto a million random developers building a million random things, even though it's all happening on top of this same messy, inconsistent, out-of-date foundation. These are the same people who broke graphical UX norms without any standard to replace them! It just ain't gonna work man
Went to a talk at JMM about making materials for math courses that satisfy current DOE guidelines for accessibility
And one of the things that came up is that we by default produce all of our materials in PDF format, and those aren't screen reader-accessible.
And there are a couple projects to produce screen reader-accessible PDFs, but it is not actually possible to succeed because the different screen readers don't agree on what they want a PDF to look like to be read correctly.
To previous anon: Baumol's Cost Disease isn't a thing. It's the Laffer Curve for a new generation of contemptible wannabe policy wonk: every application of it is either flatly incorrect (college professor salaries are frequently cited as an example of cost disease, despite average professor salaries either barely matching or shrinking relative to inflation over the last several decades) or better explained by other things. And at least the Laffer Curve had the virtue of being clearly falsifiable! BCD citers assume it's the skeleton key for understanding post-industrial socio-economic woes while ignoring how weak the evidence for it actually is, and handwaving any evidence against it.
These are guys who walk around thinking it's a major economic crisis that schoolteachers and bus drivers are overpaid. Compared to what? A Bay Area programmer who pulls $500K a year making Google's products slightly worse every update? That's what they think the pinnacle of productive labor is? Christ.
Baumol’s core insight seems indisputable to me: there are some areas you just can’t increase efficiency, like how an orchestra can’t play a symphony any faster by adding members. People may overapply the concept, but it seems pretty solid fundamentally?
To be fair, Laffer's core insight is also absolutely correct. It's just the parameters people throw on it that are crazy.
(The place where you can clearly see actual Laffer dynamics in real life are on vice taxes. We've raised cigarette taxes much higher than the point of optimal revenue—which is fine, because the point was to get people to stop smoking. Similarly, a lot of carbon tax proposals are aiming for a rate higher than the revenue-maximizing rate.)
But to focus on the listed examples briefly, the problem isn't that teachers are "paid too much"; it's that technology hasn't made them (much) more efficient, so we can't get the same amount of "teaching" out of fewer teachers. And part of this is accidental/pragmatic, in that ed tech so far hasn't really worked.
But also part of it is definition, insofar as there's a daycare aspect. If you demand one teacher per thirty students for six hours each day, no technology can enable you to use fewer teachers.
(My favorite comment on this is that the classic example, as you give, is that it still takes the same number of people to play Beethoven's Fifth that it did when he wrote it. And that is true—if you insist on playing it the way they did when he wrote it. Today I can have Beethoven's Fifth played for me, in my apartment, for like five cents.)
it's a little thing but it annoys me that both blue marble and hello world (photos of earth taken from the apollo 17 and artemis II missions respectively) are South pole up but people often crop and rotate them to be the 'correct' orientation. appreciate our beautiful planet in all her directions smh.
Unedited "Blue Marble":
Unedited "Hello World":
I saw somewhere a really helpful GIF, which did not rotate the Artemis shot, but did have it transition between the unrotated shot, and a version with the clouds removed and political boundaries layered on.
Looking at the Artemis II shot directly it's hard to tell what part of the Earth that is; once you see that the bulk of the landmass is the western bit of Africa it starts making sense.
This isn't quite as good as the one I saw but still helpful:
huh I never saw Clockwatchers, another one of those '90s movies about a bizarre bureaucratic office space hellscape that solidified the genre and froze it in time even as the world swept it away, although the mindset persists even if the staplers and rubber stamps are gone.
labyrinths of white featureless corridors straight out of Severance and insanely claustrophobic towers of filing cabinets, do companies even have a mailroom any more?
Ebert wrote:
This is a rare film about the way people actually live. It’s about the new world of security cameras, Muzak, cubicle life and hoarding office supplies. “Try not to make too many mistakes,” a new temp worker is told. “These forms are expensive.”
the way people actually live? hiring temps to use typewriters in 1998? at least they also had a photocopier (always broken, but unlike the printer in Office Space the next year it's the result of deliberate sabotage).
I guess Dilbert came out in 1989 but it's funny the way a trend always peaks in the movies some years after it has already crested in reality, and we still make movies about working in 1930s (or 1830s?) offices today long after computers and then the internet are swept them away.
My mother worked in a law office in the 80s that was an early adopter of word processors (as I think a lot of legal firms were).
And they had an older secretary, and they'd hand her documents to type up, and she would, and there would of course be some number of errors. And they'd correct them and send them back, and the new version they'd get would have those errors fixed but would have randomly introduced new errors.
It took them a while to realize the secretary didn't realize she could use the word processor to edit documents. She was, typewriter-style, completely re-typing them after every round of edits.
The first manned lunar flyby was Apollo 8, which launched on December 21, 1968. People complain that yesterday's launch didn't get very much publicity, so I wanted to compare: last time around they got some front-page coverage on NYT each day of the trip. Today they also got a photo of the launch, so I guess we'll see what they do tomorrow.
I feel like everyone on the internet is refusing to shut up about it and I hate it.
(Something something the internet is full of self-selecting bubbles.)
But I wish everyone would stop talking about it, and then maybe the whole thing would go away and they'd stop doing it.
Dammit who invented sans-serif fonts and how can we make them stop.
I've never had that much problem with Comic Sans specifically.
I'm upset about people writing body text in plan vanilla sans-serif fonts. Like this one that you're probably reading right now, because Tumblr defaults everything to sans-serif, even though in large blocks of text it's demonstrably harder to read.
