Biden spent roughly a trillion dollars of increased-corporate-tax money on domestic manufacturing, and armed the NLRB to meaningfully fight for unions which enabled them to backstop a lot of the union gains that have suddenly magically happened over the last few years. There was actually a court battle because he fired the corporate hack who had Trump put in charge of it on his very first day.
If you got paid $11 an hour in 2019, that means on the average you now make $14.52 an hour -- which means even accounting for inflation you're coming out ahead.
definitely not enough to make much of a difference in a country where half can't afford their rent and groceries are likewise becoming unaffordable. And that's saying nothing about cost-prohibitive health care and education or child care.
You're like the third person in the last 24 hours who has persistently failed to understand the entire concept of inflation-adjusted wages -- the idea that someone's wages could rise by so much that even with rent and groceries more expensive now, they could still wind up ahead. You understand that that's what happened, right? Or not yet?
His record demonstrates that he's legislating more for the billionaire class than the poor.
What record is that?
What's your assessment of the meaning of Amazon's quarterly tax rate over time, and its connection to Biden's 15% minimum corporate tax?
That’s after adjusting for absolutely punishing Covid inflation during 2021 and 2022. If it was the same NLRB and IRA actions against a normal level of inflation instead of having inherited an absolute apocalypse economically, that lowest bracket of real wages would have gone up 25%.
What do you believe happened to working class wages between 2020 and now?
You gotta talk to the post-1968 activist left about how well it worked out for them pursuing that vision. That’s how we got Reagan; that’s how the “single income family with one guy with a high school diploma supporting a house and good middle-class life that’s unrecognizable to most people today” went all the fuck away.
Again, if you want to go further than the fuckin Democrats that sounds great. If letting the Republicans defeat the Democrats is a key element of that strategy, you’re gonna have to break down the details to me because to me it doesn’t make a single bit of fucking sense.
What is that, if not progress?
If the thesis is “let’s keep going we need way more”, the great. If the thesis is “let’s shit on the team that achieved 30% higher wages and imply they’re the same as the team that actively wants to undo all of that and leave us with just the 20% inflation and no higher wages” then I will respectfully disagree.
Oooooohhh
That's why they are getting downvotes 🙂
Sssh you're not supposed to use the actual numbers
You're supposed to pull Trump-style wild exaggerations out of thin air, and then disappear and have someone else take over (apparently) when someone questions the reality you are presenting
it also does this with a bunch of weird little local newspapers or etc which I've never heard of, which is like the one time I actually want it to be providing me with some kind of frame of reference for the source. MSNBC and the NYT, I feel like I already know what I think about them.
Not directly related to MBFC bot, but what's your opinion on other moderation ideas to improve the nature of the discussion? Something Awful forums have strawmanning as a bannable offense. If someone says X, and you say they said Y which is clearly different from X, you can get a temp ban. It works well enough that they charge a not-tiny amount of money to participate and they've had a thriving community for longer than more existing social media has been alive. They're absolutely ruthless about someone who's being tricksy or pointlessly hostile with their argumentation style simply isn't allowed to participate.
I'm not trying to make more work for the moderators. I recognize that side of it... the whole:
This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
... makes perfect sense to me. I get the idea of mass-banning sources to get rid of a certain type of bad faith post, and doing it with automation so that it doesn't create more work for the moderators. But to me, things like:
... create a lot more unpleasantness than just simple rudeness, or posting something from rt.com or whatever so-blatant-that-MBFC-is-useful type propaganda.
- Open source the database and the bot.
Yes. A certain amount of my complaint about MBFC bot is not that it's a bad idea per se, it's just that the database and categorizations are laughably bad. It puts Al Jazeera in the same factual classification as TASS. It lists MSNBC as factually questionable and then when you look at the actual list, a lot of them are MSNBC getting it right and MBFC getting it wrong. It might as well be retitled "The New York Times's Awful Neoliberal Idea of Reality Check Bot". (And not talking about the biases ranking -- if that one is skewed it is fine, but they claim things are not factual if they don't match the appropriate bias, and the bias is unapologetic center-right.)
You can't set yourself up to sit in judgement of sources that write dozens of articles every single day about unfolding world events where the "objectively right" perspective isn't always even obvious in hindsight, and then totally half-ass the job of getting your basic facts straight about the sources you're ranking, and expect people to take you seriously. I feel like mostly the Lemmy hivemind is leaps and bounds ahead of MBFC bot at determining which sources are worth listening to.
- it wouldn't be too hard to manually enter Wikipedia's Perennial Sources list into the database that the bot references
FUCK FUCK FUCK YES
This is an actual up-to-date and very extensive list that people who care bother to keep up to date in detail (even making distinctions like "hey this source is ok for most topics but they are biased when talking about X, Y, Z"). This would immediately do away with like 50% of my complaint about MBFC bot.
The bot calls Al Jazeera "mixed" factually (which is normally reserved for explicit propaganda sources), and then if you look at the details, they don't even pretend it has anything to do with their factual record -- just, okay they're not lying but they're so against Israel that we have to say something bad about them.