mozz

Yeah, 2022 was a shit show. That’s when all the Covid inflation hit, that ate up the gains in wages at the top of the scale and then some. The fact that even with that having happened, wages at the bottom have been beating inflation by quite a bit, is a damn miracle. But yeah I’m a little surprised it went down by only 6% in 2022.

Health care is a good one yeah - the number of uninsured people has been dropping steadily the last few years, to where now it’s lower than it’s ever been. Enrollment in ACA-sponsored plans shot up when Biden started unfucking some of the things that the Republicans had done to try to kill it. Idk how health care spending looks, but there’s like 20 million people who have health care now who didn’t before, I know.

Yeah probably so

Yeah, agreed. There are tons of valid reasons to criticize the police (or, I would say, demand accountability from them in keeping with the amount of power they're granted by the legal system). But just framing something deliberately slanted because you want to make them look as bad as possible doesn't seem like a good addition to that list though.

There's a lot there but I read the cited 2015 paper. From it:

Officers knocked on the door; when no one answered, they kicked down the door and took Diggs, who was bleeding from a small facial wound, outside

, according to Prince George’s County, Maryland prosecutors.

When asked about the recent increase in arrests of District of Columbia police officers, Chief Cathy Lanier noted that

Ninety-eight officers were arrested more than once on domestic violence charges between 2007 and 2010

And then:

Part IV asks why, in contrast, police officers are able to abuse their partners with impunity

Kinda sounds like literally every single example in this paper involves some sort of prosecution of the cops who were involved, i.e. not with impunity. No?

This is part of what I was saying -- I think back in 1992, the culture that if a cop beat up his wife or drove drunk, his co workers would look the other way was almost universal. I know it's definitely not universal now. Is it still common? I honestly don't know. But getting a honest answer to that question seems like a vital step in stopping it from happening in the places where it is still happening. Right? Or no?

There are actually much much worse and more systemic stories than these. I'm just saying that it's good to want to arrive at an actual measurement of how often it happens (because it's way different if it's 40% versus 10% versus 4%), and that it's bad to just pick the highest number you can and say that that's obviously what's going on because cops are terrible people. How do we know they're terrible people? Because 40% of them beat their wives, that's how.

Theerre's the hostility I was trying to bait into existence 😃

Honestly I apologize tho

Honestly I set out to make again the point about “asking people how they feel like things are going isn’t actually a good way to measure economics, especially when 50% of them (you know the ones) are programmed by the news they consume to be in a state of constant frothing panic about inflation, crime, and immigrants” - but I looked at the report itself and its charts and I actually really like them. They seem like they ask enough very specific things to get down to brass tacks of how people are doing on a month to month survival level in a way that seems like it’s exactly one of the key things that the Fed should be tracking. So yeah fair play.

Idk if I would have led off with all the worst possible things you can find - like take a report that says, 72% of adults say they’re doing okay or better financially, and find the highest statistic that you can find that can be paired up with something bad, and then put that in the headline instead - but the actual report seems really good.

Totally reasonable. If there’s one thing I like doing, it is undermining a useful message by being condescending about it for no good reason.

(Also I was clearly being unfair, since the wave of opposition I was expecting hasn’t materialized)

Those are already inflation adjusted dollars - gains on the chart represent gains above inflation. The source is here with more explanation, and looking over it actually will show some important / upsetting caveats to what I said - just bear in mind that for some confusing reason, it is showing percentage change in a lot of its charts, instead of the raw underlying number.

And yeah I get that - I feel like I am becoming humorless and just yelling at people all the time good things about Biden. My feeling on it is more or less, why are you guys making me stick up for the Democrats I don’t even particularly like them. But it seems to me like people are spreading very specific malicious bullshit about them in this election, which is upsetting to me (because of the “bullshit” part and its potential impact on the US and the world if it swings the election, not because of the “Biden” part, if that makes sense).

Fun fact: The 40% figure is based on one single study that was a self-report study from the early 1990s, asking police whether a disagreement with their spouse had ever gotten “physical.” A follow-up study found a rate of 24%, also from the 1990s. It’s actually hard to find numbers since then (partly because it’s just inherently a hard topic to study), but assuming that every one of those self-reports was a wife beater, and that nothing has changed since 1992 (0% change in the culture of policing or the handling of domestic violence) seems unlikely.

TL;DR I don’t know what percent of police officers are wife beaters but it isn’t 40%, and claiming that it is is gleefully misrepresenting the truth; using the very outlandishness of it to claim that the cops are outlandishly and cartoonishly evil

More on this

I realize that this information will be unwelcome, and I eagerly anticipate your downvotes. Why are you booing me I’m right

Chroma is supposed to be able to import a ton of information into a vectorized format that lets you search through it in a way that's semantically meaningful, so you (or your tool) can sort of pick out the stuff from a huge batch of source material that you need to pass to the LLM for any given query.

I played around with it a little bit and I wasn't able to determine if it was a real thing or just a weird AI hype thing, but people seem to take it seriously. I would bet that someone's attempted to make a little system on top of it that lets you do stuff like what you're wanting to do (since that's what it's made for), but IDK how well it would work... might be useful to search for stuff adjacent to Chroma or vector databases to see if there are tools like that, though.