@codemonkeymike Royalty

@wdlindsy Trump can say that inflation is over, because the high inflation essentially IS over, and has been for a while--it's just that prices are still higher than we remember and would like them to be.

But he'll say he fixed it. Somehow.

Trump's supporters still insist that the economy was a dumpster fire under Obama and Trump fixed it. Of course, you can't see that in any economic indicator you look at--there was a gradual recovery from about 2010 on, and it continued under Trump.

But when Obama was in, Republicans insisted that any improving economic indicator was fake. When Trump entered office, these numbers abruptly became real, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy. The key element was the permission to believe.

Liberals are also unwilling to full-throatedly take the opposite side and say everything is great, because they actually care about longstanding structural inequities. It's what political commentators sometimes call "the Hack Gap"--if you're unwilling to construct your entire worldview around cheering for your team, it's a political disadvantage relative to someone who will.

@apophis @futurebird Rich people are WAY RICHER than they were a few decades ago, in comparative terms. A smaller number of them control a much larger portion of the total economic product, and have tremendous power, and being in this position seems to be absolutely toxic to the human brain.

The situation is more like the late 19th century, the Gilded Age. And the rich people of that time were buck wild.

@futurebird Rich people seem worse than they've been in decades. They were never great but for Christ's sake, they've lost all sense of fake propriety. That's my biggest complaint.

@futurebird I keep hearing cultural critics and educators talking about the young as if they are intellectually stunted in some unprecedented and alarming way (and they always say they know the reason: it's the pandemic closures, it's smartphones, it's social media, it's that they don't read books, it's pop culture)

and I think, I don't know, maybe they're talking about the ones I haven't met. The kids I've known seem all right.

@skinnylatte My wife had an interesting observation along those lines, which is that managers and investors seem to see AI as a tool to give cheap junior employees the productive power of more senior ones; but really junior workers are the ones least equipped with the judgment to see whether the AI is leading them down a wrong path. What they need is something the AI doesn't have.

@skinnylatte the dangers I worry about almost all boil down to the gap between what actually existing "AI" can do, and what people think it can do. People ranging from children to venture capitalists. LLMs seem to have a powerful ability to generate misplaced trust.