Give me half a million and I’ll find a new car for you.
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That’s seems more like pandemic fatigue, and the sense that if you are vaccinated, and boosted, you have done what you can and want to move on with life. I think we are both in that boat.
That’s a good point. In particular, they are very sensitive to gas prices.
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Well how about stuff like this? Why not be honest about this instead of hiding it and hoping it never came to light? A virus comes from a place with an infectious disease lab and people start asking questions and everyone says nothing to see here. Yet a year later we see there is something to see there. Why lie? It breeds mistrust and fuels the conspiracy theorists even more. This lie and the mask lie at the very beginning destroyed all confidence in Fauci from the right. Then Biden basically doubled down on Fauci who has 0 credibility to the right instead of just finding someone new. Don’t you think this stuff damages people’s credibility and fuels the right wing media? I mean Fauci isn’t the only infectious disease expert in America. We have another thread saying we can easily choose a black woman for the Supreme Court because there are probably 200 or more people in the US qualified for the Supreme Court. There are far more Dr’s than there are judges in the US so why did Fauci have to keep being the guy. Just fire him and move on. He has no credibility with 40% of the country and this fact has caused more problems because we keep toting him out as the expert.
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Because people want both the wage growth and stable prices. Partially, because we’re greedy creatures. Partially, because we’re not sure that the wage growth is outrunning inflation. Have you priced a used car?
Not everybody lives on wages. We’ve got retirees with fixed DB pensions. If they also/instead have savings, they are trying to find “safe” places to put their savings that provide returns higher than inflation. Have you looked at real bond yields over the last 10 years?
When we have fewer people working than the trend line would have predicted, we’ve got fewer economic goods/services to go around. That’s a real loss in consumption. Somehow, the system has to deliver that message. The market response is prices that go up faster than incomes.
Yep, I agree it’s great that lower income people are probably getting wage growth that exceeds inflation. Many of them did it by trading up to better jobs as employers backfilled people who left the workforce. But, everybody can’t be a winner.
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If you fire him and hire someone who tells people to get vaccinated, and to wear masks in public, would that change the trajectory? Should they fire him because the right is cooking up conspiracy theories? Jim Jordan is one of the biggest gaslighters in Congress.
The letter cited in the article that claims the NIH admitted to gain of function sounds like it actually contradicts the claim:
"The research plan was reviewed by NIH in advance of funding, and NIH determined that it did
not to fit the definition of research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP)
because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans. As such, the research was
not subject to departmental review under the HHS P3CO Framework.
…
While it might appear that the similarity of RaTG13 and BANAL-52 bat coronavirusesto SARSCoV-2 is close because it overlaps by 96-97%, experts agree that even these viruses
are far too divergent to have been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. For comparison, today’s
human genome is 96% similar to our closest ancestor, the chimpanzee. Humans and
chimpanzees are thought to have diverged approximately 6 million years ago.
The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance
grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic. "
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Oh for sure I think a big part of why very right-wing people are more accurate on mortality is because their political view is closer to the truth on the mortality risk of COVID, but that’s fine. If your partisan view is closer to the truth that sounds like an improvement over your partisan view being farther from the truth, as is the case in most very liberal circles about COVID risk.
Some people think if Trump is reelected they will be able to get $1.80 gas again.
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It could happen, maybe they slash the gasoline tax
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…and we can just print more money to offset the reduced tax, since we certainly don’t seem inclined to cut spending in any meaningful way.
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I think a big messaging problem we’re running into is the fact that higher gasoline prices is by design. If we’re really going to deal with climate change we’re going to pay more for all kinds of energy, most especially if we’re uptight about nuclear. It’s easy to get buy in on a guaranteed job in the Green New Deal, what’s difficult is to get buy in on people voluntarily paying higher energy prices to deal with climate change.
I honestly have not seen a great statistic on age related CFRs for a while now, and most of what is out there is seems like early data from 2020.
The messaging from the media sources is certainly reflected in their understanding of the pandemic risk, and that is going to go beyond just a single number like population fatality rates. Those same right wing people who say COVID is 99% survivable also seem to frequently challenge the idea that we have accurately counted 1M deaths in the US, seemingly unaware that this is less than a third of what would happen in the US if everyone caught COVID, based on their own preferred statistic.
Another great example of hiding the full truth from the public to get their buy in on what’s good for them. The right lies about the cause of global warming, but they will readily tell you what it’s going to cost to fix it. Meanwhile the left never talks about the cost, only the things that need to change. The full truth should be out there on every one’s lips, then we can have a real debate instead of setting across from each other yelling.
Have you looked into the cost of doing nothing about global warming? It is not free either.
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The most positive answer I can give you is timing and the lag of personal experience. It took an artificial reboot of the economy (Did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?) for a significant number of lower wage earners to realize in a cognitive way the inherent inequity in the system. This can be generalized as they needed hand outs to keep from being thrown out on the street while the news is full of wealthiest individuals and corporations having record profits and wealth growth.
The worker’s economy is changing as you noted. Lots of workers changing jobs and life choices for a different work life balance such as working remotely. Lots of workers changing jobs for significant pay raises. Lots of workers in and out of the job market or disgruntled with their treatment during a pandemic. All of these workers experiencing the immediate effect of inflation and the disruption of the supply chain in certain goods. (How many people could actually describe the supply chain in a meaningful manner?). The financial aspects of their lives are change and pain.
If those changes in the workers lives are for the better, better wages, better work life balance, better protection via unions then eventually their lives will be better. Now though, they are in transition and that increases stress and uncertainty.