Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a measure of average wage growth right? I think it’s possible that there are big variations between geographic regions and industries and income, so for some people wage growth more than outpaced inflation but for a lot of others it didn’t.

choose to extend a war in Ukraine and send 100 billion to Ukraine while their own are struggling.

a) they didn’t start that war,

b) out of all the stupid shit our federal government spends money on, why fixate on this one?

c) rich people and companies are under-taxed anyway, so it’s not like we’re hurting for potential revenue. We have more than enough money to fund Ukraine’s defense and take care of poor people.

what people live under is what matters

That much I agree with and have known since George W Bush won the popular vote in 2004 despite there being no WMDs in Iraq and all sorts of civilian casualties because gas stayed cheap

As far as this “being the last election”, there’s too many safeguards in our governmental system and too many armed people (in both the civilian and military population) with deep vested interests to ensure real elections still happen for that to change.

I’m not so sure considering there’s a good argument to be made that this wasn’t a “real” election, given all the voter suppressing bullshit that happened. I think we need to ask ourselves what a “real” election is and how we will know if we lose them, because I don’t think even our good elected officials are going to tell us about it (because they think, arguably correctly, that living under a stable autocracy is better than the chaos that could happen when a mass of people reject the legitimacy of the government).

Bad times are not end times.

This is true and cannot be said enough. The world doesn’t end, it moves on to the next struggle, and there is always a way to make it better. It might be very small, but there is always something to do. Like, yesterday I ended up up hanging out with some very sad old ladies who volunteered for my local League of Women Voters chapter and got them to laugh a couple of times at how ridiculously bad at bridge I am, and that was the little bit of good I could do yesterday. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I have to be honest, I am panicking a little bit.

I don’t have any great insight to offer, but - yeah, me too

I don’t think you’re wrong but I also have to add that I won’t accept that we just can’t run black women for offices for that reason

e; I should have read this thread further, it looks like other people are already discussing this

(whose first act as president was to essentially absolve the previous administration and Wall St of their many sins in case anyone forgot how moderate he was).

I think this very thing led to the 2010 tea party wave election that fucked us for a decade and a similar thing has happened here, except it was the seeming inability of the Biden administration to hold Trump and his supporters accountable and not going after corporations making record profits during an inflationary crisis (“So how would you recommend they have done that?” Great question, I will let you know when I have a good answer).

e;

Well, all that and the obvious election interference from Musk, Putin, and the ontological inability of traditional media not to platform literal fascists.

This absolutely played a huge roll (also, voter suppressing laws passed by GOP governments), but I don’t know how to change any of that without having a Democratic party that consistently wins elections first

I’m not gloating, I just said I didn’t want to seem like I was because I’m not trying to antagonize my political allies. I’m sorry if it seems like I am because that really is the last thing I want to do. I want Republicans to lose elections and I’m just putting forth a theory of why they didn’t last night that seems persuasive to me because I’m still operating under the assumption we’ll have more elections (which, like, very TBD, but either way I think building a coalition of like-minded people will be important).

Do you think the department of education writes the textbooks, standardized tests (SAT, ACT, etc.), grading and student management software, learning management systems (Google Classroom, Canvas), or manufactures its own classroom tech (Chromebooks, tablets)?

Each one of those has a bunch of particular nuances, but in general - yeah, I think they could and should in a lot of those cases

The education system is full of for-profit businesses that can jack up the prices, and they do.

Yeah, it’s a big problem with a lot of little parts to be tackled

The DOE simply doesn’t have the resources to create these things themselves

Then government should give them the resources (actually, I think a whole separate agency that develops open source software for any government agency or anyone else who wants to use them should be established, but that’s kind of besides the point).

and would cost them far more if they tried

I don’t think that’s true, and even if it were I think we should be willing to pay premium to make sure essential systems that support the public good are being administered in democratic ways (e.g. by public agencies that are required to give public reports to elected lawmakers and be subject to citizens’ FOIA requests).

the business model has existed forever

A lot of stupid ideas hang on for a really long time. Like, we still have monarchies in the 21st century world.

Personally, I’m more concerned with the use of Google products in schools. A company that’s sole business is harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers should have no place in schools or children’s products. But they’ve embedded themselves into everything so people just accept it at the cost of privacy

I 100% agree this is a significant problem too, I just haven’t come across any good articles about it recently

Exactly, they’re a captive audience, and moreover they are legally incompetent to consent to a contracted business relationship like this

If this was a department of education AI or even some kind of transparently administered non-profit organization I’d be fine with this, but the fact that this is being developed for some for profit company that can just jack their rates and cut off public schools whenever they want to is bullshit. Like, I’m not opposed to the technology of LLMs at all, I think they’re actually pretty neat, but our social and economic systems have a lot of exploitative trash in them that cool technologies can inadvertently exacerbate.

Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.

“Imposing any kind of environmental regulations in businesses would destroy the entire economy, concludes team of economists paid by those businesses. Coming up next - are you doing enough to protect your family from dangerous toxins in our environment? We’ll tell you what a dumb and lazy piece of shit you are, after these ads!”

“They asked me how well I understood class consciousness. I said I was a member of the conscious class. They said welcome aboard.”

Ah, you’re totally right,thank you, I’d been using those interchangeably without thinking about it much

Synthesis: everyone should have a well constructed residence with ample sound dampening where late night fireworks and early morning traffic noise wouldn’t be a problem. Capitalist real estate developers minimizing their costs and maximizing their profits have us fighting each other when they’re the real problem.

e; I was actually thinking microphones would pick up and retransmit sounds after running it through some reverb and flanging to get a cozy underwater effect, but damping external sounds makes a lot more sense

That actually might be exactly what we should do, just try to reinterpret this before it gets off the ground and make all their attempts to dogwhistle to their fellow shitheads come off like they’re just calling themselves paranoid schizophrenics

And, like, for what it’s worth, “Is bigotry a mental illness?” is a question that’s gotten some academic debate. The professional consensus is still “no,” but it honestly makes a lot of sense to me to think of bigotry as a form of delusional and compulsive thinking (although I don’t want to minimize the evil of racism or demonize mentally ill people, so like I’m still thinking over that one).

The problem with that problem is you can say any kind of accusation of racist behavior is non-falsifiable in the same way (“You can’t prove I was shitty to them because they were black, maybe I was shitty to them because they’re just a jerk”), but everyone knows racist behavior and dog whistles still exist

if people buy the claim

This is a good demonstration of why the concept of dog whistles isn’t really a problem, because when it’s a totally absurd accusation people aren’t going to buy it.

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Yeah, I’m not a Texan but I also disagree about this. Also, Austin has produced some amazing music over the years (for example, random Austin band I’ve been in love with recently is Being Dead).

Jerry Springer:… Any job I’ve ever had it’s been the same constituency, it’s been middle and low-income people that need a voice, that need help, that need whatever. So, even in my entertainment, that’s my base. In politics, it certainly was my base. When I practiced law, it was my base. This is who I am.

54 years ago, this week, I came to America. I was five years old. Most of my family had been killed in the holocaust in the camps in Germany and Austria during World War II.

[Podcast host] Alex Blumberg: The speech that you’re hearing now is one Springer delivered back in January of 2003 to a group of Ohio Democratic county chairs. There was no press there. And the only reason we have it on tape is because an audience member recorded the whole thing on a personal tape machine from his chair. He probably thought that it’d be a joke, but he was so moved by the speech that he took the tape and had it duplicated at his own expense. He sent it around to all the county chairmen around the state, the idea being, here’s a guy with a message for us.

In the speech, Springer gives his standard economic spiel and also condemns America’s current foreign policy as arrogant and bullying. And then he ends with his own story of first coming to America with his refugee parents on a boat from Europe.

Jerry Springer: We came over on the Queen Mary, January 19th to January 24th, a five day voyage over to America in 1949. And, when we arrived, my very first memory was my mom waking me up and saying, “Jerald, we have to go up on the top deck there.” One of the decks of the Queen Mary. And all I remember-- because the rest has been told to me. I was only five-- but I vividly remember everyone standing out on top of the ship and the deck there-- there were about 2,000 passengers on board-- packed together, packed together. And what I remember, other than being freezing, is that nobody said a word. It was absolute quiet.

And we were passing the Statue of Liberty. And my mother told me later on, as I got older because, obviously, I wouldn’t remember exactly what I’d said, but she remembers me asking her what are looking at and what does it mean? And she said, in German, eines tages, alles. One day, everything.

The Statue of Liberty means everything. We take it for granted today. We take it for granted. Remember, the Statue of Liberty stands for what America is. We, as Democrats, have to remind ourselves and remind the country the great principles we stand for. This is a place of protection. This is not a country of bullies. We are not an empire. We are the light. We are the Statue of Liberty. Thank you for having me.

[APPLAUSE]

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/258/transcript