What should he be doing instead? If he somehow had the legal authority to make companies cut production in the US, gas prices would increase drastically, the price of everything made with oil or transported with oil (which is basically everything) would spike, and consumption wouldn’t even go down much.

What needs to happen is to have an alternative to oil first, and Biden’s infrastructure bill was a big step in that direction, at least compared to every other president before him.

They will probably pass it back to the states. It’s not like the blue states were going to vote for Trump anyways, and the “unfairness” of it will probably boost him in purple and red states.

They would be struggling a whole lot less if Putin wasn’t actively ripping the USA apart from the inside.

The problem is that our society not only failed to punish, but actively rewarded someone who committed atrocities on par with world history’s worst people. The problem is that it still does, which encourages more people like him to do more things like he did.

The idea is that deflation affects the investor class. Assuming a “healthy” 3% inflation rate, the value of your savings decreases by 3% per year. That means you lose money if you can’t invest in something earning more than 3%. Traditionally interest rates have been around 0%, which means bonds and savings accounts also pay 0%. So, your only options to not lose the value of your savings is to invest in the stock market, risky businesses, or real estate.

As a middle class person that means that it mostly affects my 401k, but for millionaires and billionaires, deflation means that they would sit on their hoard instead of investing it. Traditionally that means no funding for new businesses, inventions and ideas, and that’s also why the investor class pays much lower taxes than the working classes.

But nowadays “investment” seems to mostly be buying good companies and enshitifying them or bribing politicians, so maybe it would be better if we encouraged the rich to sit on their money instead of using it to make society worse.

100% this. It’s great that inflation is only 4% now, but the price of nearly everything doubled since 2019, and wages, particularly for middle class and upper middle class have not increased enough. And the modest wage increases for the poor were used to further justify the price increases. And prices never go down, because “deflation=bad”.

But, I will say that greedflation hit worldwide and the USA weathered it better than many other countries.

With pensions gone and Social Security unlikely to exist when Millennials and younger retire, we have no choice but to hand our retirement savings to Wall Street. Otherwise it’s impossible to even beat inflation long term, let alone to have enough compound interest to actually live off of.

You can set up your 401k to only invest in good companies, but again, it’s unlikely to be enough to actually retire off of. I wasted my best savings years trying to do this and failed. I don’t like it, but index funds that include small pieces of evil companies are pretty much the only valid option.

The biggest opponents of ending tipping are the bartenders and servers. There aren’t many other jobs where they can make hundreds of dollars in a few hours on a busy night, and they would not give up that even when offered $30 an hour

Here is a 2 minute video about being able to hold the idea that Hamas and Israel are both in the wrong and civilians are getting hurt on both sides as a result.

https://youtu.be/L0Zb9iUi0JM

You can donate to Mozilla, and I do. https://donate.mozilla.org/en-GB/

A lot of people will have to donate a lot to equal the amount they are getting from Google though, and if Google pulls that money I feel that Firefox would end before people donate enough to make up the shortfall.

Lieberman was also why Gore lost in 2000 since he was running as VP and was rotten back then too.

Biden had a really good plan. Zero interest as long as you pay at least something, and the payment being as low as $1 with a sliding scale based on income.

It’s more fair than just forgiveness to people without loans since the debt isn’t eliminated. I’m personally fine with eliminating the debt to have a more educated society, but a lot of people aren’t, and that’s a good middle ground.

What’s with Elon Musk and the letter X anyways?

Yeah, it seems odd to me that Fetterman would have voted for it. Unanimous consent means that they said “any objections” and there weren’t any. Thus there is no record of who voted for it. Maybe they planned the vote to be when some members were absent?

Simpler perhaps, but not really better. High gas prices hurt the poor disproportionately because it’s a larger part of their income, they don’t have as much control over WFH policies or their locations for reducing commutes, and they can’t typically afford to upgrade to fuel efficient vehicles. Plus since almost everything is transported by truck, high gas prices make the cost of everything else go up too.

I think part of the labor shortage is from people who did the math and quit after realising that they weren’t actually earning anything after subtracting transportation costs.

If you (in the general sense) don’t believe that Trump and his cronies committed crimes, then you would likely believe that the justice system is being used to attack him. If it’s being used to attack him, then him doing the same to his opponents is equivalent and fair.

Whether or not you believe he committed crimes is dependent on your news sources, ability to fact check and think critically, and your trust in the justice system.

A very significant portion of the population doesn’t believe he committed crimes.

Why do 34% of Americans not want paid time off work?

The government only covers it for those who don’t have insurance. It’s free to you either way, but at the end of the day someone still gets the bill.

Clearly you haven’t had a political discussion with a Trump supporting family member. It doesn’t matter that they trust you on other topics. It doesn’t matter how many facts, how much data, the actual vote counts on bills, etc you show them. The word of Trump might as well be God’s to them.

There’s a donation fund to help the strike continue. The writers aren’t calling for a boycott yet.

https://mashable.com/article/how-to-support-wga-writer-strike