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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • It’s more complicated than that. Electronics and appliances are the obvious examples of things that have inflated much slower than average (or even deflated). Apparel and tools have inflated much slower. Energy generally has inflated much slower than average, but has shown a ton of volatility. Food and cars have inflated slower than average, but individual items might have followed their own path. Healthcare, education, and housing have gone up much faster than average inflation.

    And the ratios don’t stay consistent over time. When I was a kid, burger meat was cheaper than similarly sized chicken breasts. Now the ratio is flipped. A plane ticket between New York and London is much cheaper today than in the 70’s. Even a tank of gas for driving from one state to another is way cheaper today than in the 70’s, in large part because of better fuel efficiency.

    And anything labor intensive is inherently at tension with itself. A seamstress or tailor can only make so many items of clothing per week. Those clothes will have to cost enough to justify their pay, and the raw ingredient textiles used to make the garments. So if their pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, then the labor-intensive items they make probably haven’t kept up with inflation, either. Ideally, increased productivity would allow raises to not be absorbed into the price of whatever is being produced, but that doesn’t always happen.

    Looking at old menus and catalogs shows that some things have gone up a lot in price, while others didn’t experience the same effect.



  • Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.

    If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.








  • I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.

    It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.

    It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.




  • I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.

    I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.

    Both of the American parties are a shitshow

    Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.

    Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Proton didn’t decide anything, Andy Yen posted ONE tweet and then doubled down on it with the Proton Reddit account which was deleted.

    How are you going to say that Proton didn’t say anything and then acknowledge that the official Proton social media accounts were making statements like this:

    Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses

    That’s the context you keep brushing under the rug. The official Proton position is not just that Trump made a good choice, on this one thing, it’s that you should vote for Republicans over Democrats.

    Yes, it was official corporate Proton position to delete that comment. But it was the official Proton position to make that comment in the first place.



  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it’s actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.

    I like Gail Slater. She’s possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ’s Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.

    But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren’t more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.

    Andy Yen could’ve praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn’t even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That’s the problem everyone had with it.



  • Housing, education, and healthcare costs have grown much faster than inflation.

    Food, energy, cars, appliances and home goods, furniture, apparel, and other durable goods have generally grown slower than inflation, at least between 1980 and 2020. Much of the last 5 years of inflation, though have eaten away at some of those gains of the previous 30-40 years in those categories.

    Electronics, technology, entertainment, most services have generally gone down in price.

    So the basket of what we buy is different, with different ratios. A time traveler from the 80’s would be shocked to learn just how many ready made rotisserie chickens or pizzas you could buy for the wage equivalent to one hour of warehouse work, or how many big screen TVs you’d need to pay the average monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment. Plane tickets between New York and LA are basically cheaper than one month’s rent in the cheapest possible home you can find in either of those cities. The ratios are all different than before.

    But with housing costs high, it kind of puts all of the effort into that single basket. When it used to be that 1/3 your income could comfortably go into housing costs, now in many cities it’s closer to half, even for people up the income scale, because the rest of life beyond having a roof over your head is just cheaper in comparison to that very basic need for shelter.



  • No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.

    And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That’s an incentive for fraud.