Indeed ! This Would be much easier to take seriously if Sundar hadn’t meet with Sunak, Modi, Biden et al. In the first year or so since getting the job.
Another narrative: employment was up and workers were gaining power. Out of nowhere, JP Morgan Chase chairperson started going to meetings and talking about a recession, over and over. Other businesses took his lead and started raising prices. After a while we're no closer to a recession, but we have lost a lot in standard of living.
It’s pretty basic supply and demand. Inflation historically goes up in an economy when a lot of people want to buy stuff, and that stuff is in limited supply.
Workers had cash and stimulus money = higher demand
The pandemic fucked with good manufacturing, and transport = reduced supply
When there is less of something, and people have money, they’re willing to pay more to get their hands on the scarce thing. Companies pay more for chips, or to have first dibs on something from the port, and that increased cost is passed along to the consumer.
If it was merely an increase in costs, corporate profits should be neutral after they hike their prices to match. Same ratio going in and out.
What we actually saw was corporate profit margins going to record highs. Some sectors did see actual price increases–pandemic supply constraints, the Suez canal being blocked up by a shipping accident, and the war in Ukraine all did cause upward pressure on prices in some sectors. However, none of it could explain the data fully.
Even worse, those corporations saw 15-20% profit margins for the first time ever, and now their public stockholders expect them to keep doing it forever. This is insane. Big tech firms can see that kind of margin, but they’re the exception. Not even banks see those margins on the regular. The belief that they can has driven many of the layoffs from otherwise profitable companies this year.
Corporations used world events as a cover for increasing prices. They had a once in a century opportunity to cover their actions and took it. To be honest, it usually is the case that prices don’t just go up as a matter of greed. That’s not what happened this time.
If it was merely an increase in costs, corporate profits should be neutral after they hike their prices to match. Same ratio going in and out.
You might see that initially, but all of the little supply and demand changes start to inflate the overall value of the dollar, that starts to show up in profits.
Every company is affected differently during times of high inflation. I work for a fortune 50 company that had their earning take a hit because of inflated prices. That said, profit margins for many companies absolutely can and do inflate with the value of the currency.
Your profits are fuel for future investments, and if your finance team is doing their job correctly, they are making sure that profit is adjusted for inflation.
When a handful of corporations control entire industries, capitalism stops working.
It’s supposed to be a bunch of competitors trying to get as many sales as possible by having the lowest prices or highest quality.
But in the current economy, if a corporation raises their prices across the board, the rest raise their prices. The only times they lower prices, is straight to a loss to force small competitors out of business. The large corporations can deal without profits for six months, smaller companies go under and often have to sell to the giant corporations.
This cycle has been repeating for decades, it’s not hard to notice it
The only solution is breaking up those giant corporations. Republicans sure as shit won’t do it, but neither will the moderate wing of the Democratic party. It would cut into their donations too much.
If anything in the economy is “too big to fail” the solution is breaking them up, not bailing them out whenever necessary.
Do you see excess stock? Profits are not particularly high after the two years of costs that COVID created. Trillions of dollars were printed during COVID while people were not working and products were not being manufactured/farmed/repaired/…
There simply was/is more money floating around then stuff being produced. Unless God herself comes down and drops food/shelter/iPods from heaven, costs won’t come down. Failing that, it is up to us to produce these products otherwise nothing will change.
It also stops working when the vast majority of the population lacks capital. The recent experiments with a UBI in Kenya show this pretty well. Folks who decided on a lump-sum payment rather than monthly invested in creating businesses and were better off.
Why do people even try to say nothing happened with Panama papers. I’ll be the person this time and every time that shows LOTS has happened. From nearly day 1.
When a handful of corporations control entire industries... that is capitalism. Capitalism isn't some self-correcting system that benefits all, its a system that supports and benefits those who make the most profit possible. When companies have less competition and more control, they're better able to make money. And thus, are better at capitalism.
This isn't capitalism failing to function, this is capitalism working as intended. The "free-market" is an illusion created on hope and delusion.
What you’re doing is the same as saying universal healthcare and communism is the same thing…
All capitalism isn’t “free market”. The government (at least supposed to) regulate capitalism. There was a time in America when it would even break up giant corporations who had monopolies. Lots of Americans alive today were even alive when it happened.
Things changed in the 1990s when James Carville convinced people Bill Clinton caused the Dotcom boom with neoliberal economics.
Suddenly both parties were bending over backwards to funnel money to the wealthy at the expense of what’s left of the middle class.
You’re demonstrating exactly why capitalism doesn’t work. Once corporations capture politicians and grow fat, it is incredibly difficult to get them out. This isn’t an aberration. It’s inevitable in thew long run.
If Keynesians could implement their policies and hold them indefinitely, capitalism might work. They can’t.
In fact, I’ve heard Google is especially bad here. You only get ahead by shipping a product, and getting a project approved is largely politicking. It’s one of the more political business environments around.
My company seems a lot better. We don’t have aggressive ladder climbing like the big tech firms, we instead value consistency.
You only get ahead by shipping a product, and getting a project approved is largely politicking
Yep - I had a friend who worked for three years at Google, none of the products he worked on ever shipped and eventually he gave up on ever receiving a good salary (bonuses/stock options/etc are supposed to be most of the pay, but you only get that by working on a successful product)
They have ten major campuses worldwide that focus on product development, but only one of those actually ships products regularly.
I'm sorry but it's never fault of the conservatives or their leaders. Despite telling everybody else to take responsibility for their own lives and decisions conservatives have mastered the art of conspiracy so that they always have someone else to blame. In this case it's those evil liberals in the "organized left" using reverse psychology.
It’s not just that. They distrust science and medicine in all things. These are fat, gullible people, in overall poor mental and physical health; exceptions have only skated by on dumb luck. If they didn’t believe the docs on virus prevention, they don’t believe them on obesity and lung disease prevention either. If they didn’t wear masks for COVID, they don’t wear them for spraying paint remover at their jobs.
It’s industrial hygiene and physical and mental hygiene to which they are ignorant, personal hygiene, too. If they didn’t social distance to stop the spread, they dont wash their hands after taking a huge messy shit.
Decent? What makes you say that? If anything, conservative Americans at best would just have similar hygiene to non-conservative Americans. Which means poor. Because yall don’t wash your ass. You wipe it with a rag and don’t use a bidet. Just walking around with brown rings all day. No bidet-free culture has good bathroom hygiene!
What are we supposed to do at work or in public restrooms, use the bidet everyone else uses? No fucking way, let me keep the toilet paper and just shower daily.
It was better at the beginning before they started requiring names and pfp to be covered in posts. Even if it was a celebrity. All the posts were from public social media pages. If someone is enough of a dumbass to broadcast their dangerous stupidity to the world, they they don’t deserve anonymity.
The worst part is it looks suspiciously like a deliberate strategy. They told their base that deliberately not taking precautions “owns the libs”, that you should vote in person on Election Day without a mask. This creates a correlation between voting method and candidate, with mail-in votes being mostly Democratic. Then they simply attacked mail-in votes.
Thankfully it ultimately didn’t work, but they were willing to kill their voters to try it.
“The average American buys more than one new piece of clothing per week. If that matches your shopping habits, in a span of five years you have purchased more than 320 pieces of clothing.”
Who the fuck is buying multiple pieces of clothing every week? I don’t know anyone that does that. I feel like buys-ridiculous-amounts-of-clothing George is an outlier and shouldn’t be counted.
Back of the envelope, to keepy work uniform crispy, every six months or so I need to obtain:
two work shirts
two undershirts
two pairs pants
a five-pack of boxers
a pair of shoes
That’s twelve, times two to get the yearly average. I also get a six-pack of socks every other year or so, call that twenty-seven per year, plus one or two purchased for me as gifts (gloves, sweatshirts, hats, ties), call it thirty.
There’s fifty-four weeks in a year. Either the author is out-of-touch or I’m already following their advice, IDK. I just found brands that are comfortable and wear them until they’re discontinued. Personally, I wish I was buying clothes less often; I hate that I go through work shirts and pants so fast, in particular.
Edit: bad arithmetic originally. Revised estimate is more in line with author’s projection but still significantly lower.
I have a shopaholic aunt who is said to wear things she buys once on avg. She could open her own 2nd hand shop (or if she moved her stock to Europe she could open ~6 2nd-hand shops). Many women in my family are inflicted with this disease to varying degrees. It’s a gender-specific disease that I think men are immune to.
It really is the entitled version of the boots theory. I wear my clothes literally hundreds of times before they get worn out and this article is suggesting that 10 wears of “cheap” ($50) clothes and it’s trash time. This article is way out if touch to the average non-fashion obsessed buyer imo.
Lynching was named after Charles Lynch, John’s brother who was a judge who punished British loyalists without due process. It’s a much closer association than you portray.
I see you haven’t responded to the person who educated you, after you tried to gaslight strangers (intentionally or not). Any response?
Edit: sorry! Just looked at your post history, you’re actually just an inflammatory troll! I didn’t mean to treat you like an actual person, my mistake :)
There is nothing wrong with LED lights. There is just a big problem with cheap, poorly designed LEDs. You can use proper optics and control the light exceptionally well and put it exactly where its needed with very little spill over or reflections up. You can also chose whatever color and color rendering index (CRI) you like but all of this costs more money and municipal bean counters are drunk on the lowest bidder. So we get glare bomb blue light shows. I used to design this stuff so feel free to ask questions.
So I’m a wedding photographer and in the past 3 years I have noticed an increased amount of the lights at venues strobe or have really bad banding when I set my shutter speed to higher than 120. My assumption is that the new LED lights are flickering at a consistent rate to save energy but at the cost of the photos I take. Is this the case? That cheaper LED lights will flicker like that?
Not sure why, but the high power LEDs you see in cars do this if they’re cheap or done poorly. Mine came with like an ant-flicker ballast or something.
You’re seeing the 60Hz sinusoid caused by using AC electricity. 60 peaks, 60 troughs – but the like is actually turning on and off 120 times per second when on AC, unless it’s first converted to DC. Cheap LEDs just feed AC.
So what I heard a long time ago is that all LED lights essentially strobe on and off constantly, faster than the human eye can detect, though i’m willing to bet the better ones are constructed in a way that you wouldn’t notice at all (whether with the naked eye, or through a high shutter speed camera, as you mentioned), but the shittier ones strobe more frequently and not at a rate that’s as smooth/consistent as the better ones. As a little anecdote, I bought a lower quality light-tablet for tracing a while back, and was getting crazy headaches after using it for maybe an hour or so. Had to stop using it, and I think it must be an example of what poor quality LEDs are like.
So LEDs can either be strobed or powered consistently with no blinking at all. It’s a design choice and it depends on how you convert the power from AC to DC and how you want to control the brightness of the LED. It’s cheaper to feed an LED power that is modulated/strobes so all the cheap vendors do that. You can also get away with strobing the LED to achieve a brightness assuming you do it at a very high frequency so our eyes don’t perceive it. If you buy a quality LED light fixture there should be no strobing effect what so ever.
So LEDs are generally very bright by default, and there’s a limit to how much you can really dim that. The solution used is often to flicker the LED at high speed, imperceptible to human eyes, called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). Basically, by changing the percentage of time the LED is on (the width of the ON pulse) you change the perceived brightness off the light.
Cheap LED designs do this slower, cause the hardware and LEDs are cheaper. It’s not really to save energy, but to adjust brightness and manage heat.
Also, probably more importantly, cheap LED bulb designs just don’t deal with AC current as well, so you get the 60Hz flicker from the electrical line cause that doesn’t get regulated out correctly when converting to DC.
The strobing is due to the way they’re powered. When converting AC power to DC power, you can either convert the positive half of the AC sine wave (half rectified) or both positive and negative sides of the AC wave (full rectified). Cheap lights use half rectifiers so as the AC feeds in, the light is only getting powered half the time and off the other half of the time. This happens so rapidly that we don’t really see it with our eyes, but with a camera it’s very noticeable. AC cycles at 60 cycles per second (in the US), so it makes sense that you’re seeing it at 120 shutter speed as this equates to 60fps.
I’d consider talking to some of these venues about it as I assume they’re typically used for events that’ll be filmed, so using shitty lighting is ruining it for everyone same as if they had the toilets sitting in the middle of the dance floor.
It would probably be easier to just make a new one. Have a few articles slamming dems, but then secretly push left wing politics in a “conservative” voice.
“Biden doesn’t have to balls to pass the Freedom Health Care Act” (which will secretly be socialized health care).
They’re so dumb they’ll believe anything of it comes from an obese red faced man yelling. Just slip “and our guns?!!!” In every so often.
hah. exactly. Though, honestly… OAN and Faux news has name recognition. it’s hard to take the views from them, or to build up such a network. Remember. Fox was purposes built to sell propaganda since '96(?). we don’t have that kind of time
Well, you’re right that we don’t have that kind of time. The effort would have to be very organized, and it would cost a lot of money. I doubt that kind of funding could be raised knowing it was a farce without the truth getting out.
I would disagree but when Fox was whining about what AOC believed in and put it on a bulleted list it was as much an eye opener as you can get into the thinking of a conservative. Specifically that they can say “caring for seniors” is a bad thing with a straight face knowing nobody would question them.
I doubt that with these people. When you have the kinds of money these people do it’s not about more money but more power. Quite literally controlling how a not insignificant portion of the “western world” views the world is absolutely invaluable.
To a certain extent that’s just impossible since the degrees you’d have to go to for enforcement would inevitably lead to someone genuinely talking about a product they prefer getting penalized. Think of the episode of south park where the one girl turns out to be a living advert.
There has to be serious limitation on bandwidth usage. First to ban targeted advertisement, second to make national, state level, and local adverts all get equal air time, and third to cut the amount of broadcast time that can be used for advertisement and page space that can have advertisements.
The lawyers aren’t who I’m concerned about, it’s the social media corps who’ll just take to banning anyone who talks about any brand ever.
You’ve basically silenced brand criticism because it can be seen as a backhanded advert for the competition.
All the shittalk about the battlefront classic collection would get people banned for advertising BG3 by speaking negatively about its competition on the games market.
Sounds stupid, is stupid, would happen anyways, especially if the corpos caught onto it and started paying for ban waves in their favor.
It’s half that, it’s half the idea that they’re giving it to the coloreds and it’s not fair that anyone might get something that they’re not getting.
Like, handouts and welfare etc are good as long as they’re getting it, and other tribes aren’t. If the Others get it instead, then it’s the worst thing ever.
Like when Floridians complain about the federal government sending disaster relief to other states.
No, he “homeschools” his kids so they don’t get brainwashed by the liberal trans gay agenda and start using a litterbox instead of a toilet. Because we all know using litterboxes is peak endgame liberal socialisms top priority after a good social safety net and universal healthcare. Disgusting perverts!
Drives a pickup with a bunch of window decals like FJB, Punisher Skull Thin Blue Line, maga 2024, and We The People while complaining about how gays and trans are constantly "shoving it in his face".
His base is likely in favor of ending democracy to have a dictatorship of billionaires, but a chunk of people who haven’t been paying attention much may care
A big chunk of the population doesn’t realize that Biden and Trump are shoo-ins for their parties nominations, and reminding those people that Trump has doubled down on ending democracy is important.
Those people are beyond saving. But hopefully it will convince some of the "I don't like Biden so I'm gonna protest vote for some joke candidate" crowd to actually take the election seriously.
If it’s turned off, it’s like a battery that isn’t connected to anything. You have a voltage across the positive and negative terminals, but power can’t actually flow unless there’s somewhere for it to go.
No. They constantly monitor it and keep it in line. The power grid itself is totally fine. Completely.
The only “problem” is they cannot easily turn on or off huge old power plants, so if the sun is blazing, they might have to direct excess old generation power to batteries or other grids.
The only “problem” is the power companies don’t get to charge much for simply managing the grid. They charge mostly for power generation, so it ends up costing them money. If they were simply a government paid service, they wouldn’t have to care what so ever which direction power is flowing as long as it has somewhere to go.
They keep it in line by curtailing or switching off generation. The generator typically still gets paid as if it were generating whatever it has available, which is perhaps an issue, but the total generation is reduced to meet the demand.
This is why there is negative pricing, it’s cheaper to sell electricity in the negative than to pay a generator to be offline.
They can’t direct excess generation to batteries if the batteries aren’t there yet. They’re being installed, but the overall capacity is still relatively low. Transferring it to other grids also has limits, and in particular if there’s an excess of solar in one region the neighbouring regions also probably have an excess, so there really is no other option but to curtail.
“Batteries” don’t need to be what we commonly think of as storing electricity. They can very much be a different way of storing energy instead. For instance, pumping water up to a tower (or upstream), or splitting water into hydrogen + oxygen (for consumption/combustion later)
Yes I’m aware of water storage, and even quite fond of it, but it’s very dependent on geography (as you need a very large body of water so you can’t really just use a water tower) and also incredibly expensive. There are generally more effective and profitable uses for land.
Meanwhile BESS is tiny, something like 30MW per acre.
Storing energy as hydrogen is a fool’s errand, in fact many of the new use cases for hydrogen are snake oil touted by people looking to sell more hydrogen. Even ignoring the fact that hydrogen leaks through and embrittles any container it’s stored in (or that it explodes violently), converting hydrogen to electricity only leaves you about 70% of the energy you put in.
Jeeze it almost seems like the 21st century might take some sort of smart grid, and having a bunch of big dumb plants that cannot be turned on and off without great expense should be a relic of the past!
The main power company in CA (PG&E) has built tons of other things into the bills aside from power generation, so I expect my bill (which has gone up 300% since 2018) to continue to climb despite this.
my utility charges $25 a month just to be hooked up. then there's taxes and some community bullshit fees on top of the actual electricity usage. so even though my usage has dropped quite a bit over the years, and the base rate hasn't really gone up that much (about 10-12% total, over two decades).. my bill is still more than double what it used to be.
Yeah, various power generation techniques (e.g., big industrial power plants) do not want to run without a load. And switching them off temporarily isn’t really feasible (shutting them for good would ultimately be nice, but that’s another topic…).
And you can’t just “dump” huge amounts of excess of power — it needs to go somewhere.
Relatively easy tech is temporary hydrogen storage. Of course hydrogen has poorer efficiency than batteries, but if all batteries are full, excess energy could be converted to hydrogen, stored, and converted back to electricity when no solar is available, and batteries are empty. Efficiency roundtrip with current tech is roughly 70%.
Trump’s lawyers warned that if a president can be prosecuted for actions taken while in office “such prosecutions will recur and become increasingly common, ushering in destructive cycles of recrimination,” adding that “Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the Presidency as we know it will cease to exist.”
If Presidents commit crimes in office, they should be held accountable. And if the Presidency ceases to exist because of the justice of accountability, then let the office perish in injustice.
Why don’t we just let them file their frivolous lawsuits in ‘28, and throw their asses out of court in discovery when they present 0 evidence, like what pretty much always happens with these imbeciles?!
good. let every presidential term end with the asshole being led away in handcuffs. the presidency as we know it needs to cease to exist. arrest all of them.
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