• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, inflation is now much lower than its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent.

    I can never get past economic articles that miss the fundamental issue with “but inflation rates are lower!” card.

    Like, the price never went down, it just started increasing faster for a while, and is now slowing down. But it’s still increasing.

    Like imagine if you went from 0-60 in 2 seconds in an Uber, so you say “slow down”. So the driver takes 2 more seconds to go from 60-100.

    The rate of acceleration slowed down, but the past acceleration doesn’t just magically disappear.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      And wages aren’t keeping up, either. A friend just told me they got a 1% “raise” this year. After inflation, that’s a pay cut.

      • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Yeah but did you hear fast food workers make $15 bucks an hour now in at least one state? Plus people surely haven’t gone through all of their COVID stimulus savings yet.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          My favorite excuse for not paying fast food workers more is, “that’s not supposed to be someone’s permanent job, that’s supposed to be a teenager’s job.”

          Great, but we don’t live in your supposed to world and it is a permanent job for a lot of people now.

          Also, the idea that you shouldn’t pay a teenager a decent hourly wage either is pretty offensive, but that’s a whole other issue.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They’re not missing it at all. In normal circumstances, we’ve always got some low amount of inflation. If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.

        No, it would be a lot worse for the wealthy

        Deflation causes people to save money and accumulate wealth.

        The wealthy say this is bad because we won’t buy products, but now we don’t buy products because we have no money. Which is worse than not buying products because we’re saving money for a thing like a house or planning to have kids.

        Except for the wealthiest who want all the money and can’t get what people are saving. They want everyone broke and all the money they don’t have already, being in circulation so they can take it.

        Like, come on bro, it’s not complicated but there is generations of capitalism propaganda repeating that inflation is a good thing, it’s just not true for 99.99% of us. If it still doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask for clarification.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Deflation causes mass unemployment. We tried it in the 1930s. Didn’t go well.

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          We have history that we can learn from where we’ve had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there’s also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there’s constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.

          Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there’s a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising?

            I think media organizations owned by billionaires are going to keep repeating what billionaires want the poor people to hear…

            And that with rampant wealth inequality what’s good for “the economy” is rarely good for the average person.

            I thought as a society, we all understood that by now…

            But you don’t seem to have gotten any of the memos.

            • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              What you might call a memo, I’d call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you’ll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we’re in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.

              • rektdeckard@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                I mostly agree with you, but economics is at best a heaping tablespoon of math and a sack of human behavioral psychology. Those guys really only know what’s going on 6 months after it happened.

              • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires,

                I just can’t believe someone that doesn’t understand billionaires own media companies to control the public narrative still exists in 2024.

                Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.

                Because straight capitalism is unsustainable…

                But you want it to be the only option and will accept everything else we need to prop it up.

                Have a nice life, don’t expect any more replies.

                • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  It’s far easier to explain the world with historic precedent than it is with conspiracy theories.

  • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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    5 months ago

    no longer afford?..man, the last proper vacation i took was in nineteen-ninety-mother-f*cking-eight…

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    And one side is working decidedly to take away this and every summer vacation of your life - while the other side backs union labor which is the reason you and I even have weekends, a workday capped at 8 hours and vacation time period.

    Wake up and smell, old donny dipshit and his ghoulish handlers!

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Or worse, I can afford it but still can’t go because my wife can’t get the time off from work.

    She had to get a doctors note to get 2 extra days off around the 4th to recover from surgery(!)

    Surgery aside, I would have loved to have packed up this week and spent it someplace fun. My wife would have only had Thursday off. She got Wed, Thur, Fri only because her doctor told her employer to get fucked.

    It’s not like I can go “Sorry honey! Headed to Vegas! See you in a week!” Well… not if I wanted to STAY married.

    • AreaSIX @lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      That’s just an appalling situation for workers in the US. I work in the public sector and get 37 days off a year in vacation time. Admittedly, I work in the public sector and have a generous vacation deal, but it’s absolutely insane that workers in the US have a worse deal than many third world nations. My 37 days are working days, meaning I get almost 8 whole weeks of vacation time, on top of all the other regular bank holidays everyone else gets. The people there often seem to cherish your second amendment, but fuck, what tyranny are you guys waiting for. How about using them weapons for something else than suicides and accidental shootings?

      • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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        5 months ago

        all the other regular bank holidays everyone else gets.

        …“everyone else” gets six, if they’re fortunate to land a salaried position: new year’s day, memorial day, independence day, labor day, thanksgiving day, and christmas day; all those other unobserved holidays are a thing for the public sector and finance only…

        • AreaSIX @lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Alright. I was thinking about bank holidays here in Sweden. They’re generally off days for all workers here. You can choose to work, it’s not like everything is closed. But that’s a voluntary thing that your employer can’t force you to do, and which is handsomely compensated on account of it being a bank holiday. So people in the hospitality sector for example generally seem to like these shifts and there’s no shortage of volunteers to cover them. This is yet another area where the US system is raping US workers it seems.

  • SlowRoastedMadness@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    No longer? Im in my early 30s and have never been able to take a vacation since I’ve been on my own/with my wife. Between bills and rising prices, and my job combining pto and sick time, i dont have time or money to do anything more than a day trip to someplace not that far away.

    • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I’m in my late 30’s in the NYC area. What my wife and I consider a “vacation” is going to Philly and staying in a hotel with a pool, and just putzing around a different city for the weekend.

      The idea of taking a week+ off from work and flying somewhere is a foreign concept to me.

      There have been a couple of times that we have gone to states far away to stay with family/friends, but it’s usually for like a long weekend.

    • sunzu@kbin.run
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      5 months ago

      Society is overall in denial about our relationship with corpo komissars

      Vast majority of People got no time or money for anything. But we can all pretend that clowns on social media and YouTube living their best lives is normal lol

  • orcrist@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Despite negative perceptions on the state of the economy, inflation is now much lower than its June 2022 peak of 9.1 percent.

    The writers are irresponsible here. They are implying that the public is unaware of inflation, that this is a perception problem. But the reality is, nobody cares about inflation. We care about the cost of living, and we know exactly how that impacts us when we look at our credit cards and bank accounts.

  • PurplebeanZ@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Shit, I have 3 or 4 holidays every year and it still feels like I’m always working. How the hell do you cope without a single holiday??

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I make more than the average by quite a bit and have unlimited time off, my wife works PT to get out of the house and gets paid well also with basically unlimited unpaid time off (there’s the catch). Even we aren’t taking a normal vacation for us this year (flying to see family or exotic getaway), instead staying within the state and doing cheaper things like camping.

  • Tikiporch@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I don’t know why they won’t suck it up and go into debt for a week of vacation like the rest of us responsible adults.

    In reality, we’d rather just use our paid time off to relax, and vacations are hardly ever relaxing.