Y’all. You run an incumbent if you have one. I don’t know in what world you think getting someone new is a better shot than keeping a standing president in office, but it isn’t this one.

If the DNC had run Biden in 2016 we probably never would have had Trump.

Because you literally act like a mouthpiece with your constant apologetics for the aggression and war crimes of a tinpot dictator.

How much does Putin pay you?

The measures they use to say the economy is ‘good’ have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.

They account for value in dollars, that’s true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren’t really anchored to anything meaningful.

For example, let’s say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You’ve got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn’t cheap, but that’s because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.

Now let’s say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these ‘inefficiencies’ in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren’t as thick, but it’s still better than the other options, so they keep coming.

At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren’t eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.

Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.

At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you’re selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.

Except you’ve just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that’s actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.

Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?

All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don’t really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can’t get a good smoothy.

The whole thing is a mirage that we’ve been killing our society chasing.

Do you subscribe to a worldview that includes compassion? This may disqualify you from joining our capitalist shit show.

No, because they mixed up “parties’” and “party’s” and didn’t catch it, along with a couple of other weird writing quirks and clunky usages. Also it’s a pretty messy headline. There’s also a lot more descriptive and poetic language than is actually helpful for getting their point across. Like to the point that it’s wandering into New York Times levels of fluffing the length with flowery language. The writer could have used a couple of notes that they clearly didn’t get.

I agree with the writer’s position on the DNC’s failure to find their compassion and humanity on immigration. It’s the editing that needs work.

The Intercept really needs a new editor.

What do you mean? We have better voter engagement among young people than any previous generation.

People really should get used to keeping an eye out for this idea. It’s the root of so much pettiness and bad faith, and so much good faith effort is put into trying to engage with it.

I’m going to be frank. Your response to this thread is a huge red flag for me, and it makes me much less comfortable being here.

They’re not insulting or demeaning labels, they’re facts. Donald Trump is a felon. Joe Biden is complicit in authoritarian war crimes and genocide, and is quashing public dissent with state force. You know, like a fascist.

What’s disturbing, and definitely not nice, is having staff here defend these people from criticism. Slaughtering children isn’t nice. Calling it out is.

These are public figures who directly engage in hurting others as a matter of course.

Joe Biden is literally funding the murder of thousands of children, while Donald Trump is currently being tried for several felonies.

Also, while protecting these fascists and felons, you seem to mistaken me for OP.

Is ‘fascist’ name calling in this context, or ‘felon’?

Do presidential candidates really need to be protected from such milquetoast criticism?

The whole capitalizing ‘my’ thing is a really weird vibe that comes off ironically narcissistic. Also who starts an article with a digit? Does Medium no longer have editors?

Honestly it kind of reminds me of a thread that popped up here a few weeks ago.

If it were actually the mid 2000s, I’d be okay for an insane amount of time with just Flash and Audacity. Today, probably the first Baldur’s Gate.

Oo or an snes emulator with Shadowrun.

Oh god, don’t start wearing more fur. I can barely breath around other humans as it is with all the shit y’all have on.

I noticed that though he raises his voice a bit when he’s getting into the more sort of territorial part of the interaction while she spouts her talking points, when he actually gets to his own point he lowers his voice a bit.

This is really clever. Not only does he know that he’ll get his point across better with less volume and stress in his voice, but he compartmentalizes the two parts of the conversation and draws a clear delineation between them. On the one hand there’s the sort of social-territorial posturing where the words aren’t really carrying factual meaning so much as being a means of claiming space. This is the arena where Fox’s reporter is comfortable, though clearly Bernie knows his way around as well.

When he starts bringing up his own substantive points, he does so at a lower volume with an even tone. It feels like a totally different interview, because the Fox reporter literally doesn’t even know how to exist in this space.

She’s trained to compete on that level of pecking at one another to vie for status. Right-wing politics has become entirely about dragging the discussion down to that level. But if you manage to bounce right off of it and bring it back to reality the way Bernie does here, they have nothing.

Literally her only move is to bring it back down into posturing, but he already beat her in that arena.

This is the way forward.

Do you see Trump meaningfully curbing emissions? Because I see him disbanding every possible effort to lower emissions and lighting shit on fire just for fun.

Political polling has also always carried the inherent bias of more opinionated people being more willing to participate. This doesn’t matter in, say, health studies, but it sure does with politics.

You might get a range of opinions, but it’s heavily biased toward people who have a stronger urge to share their opinion. That may not always be a matter of huge significance in every single issue, but it definitely is when you’re talking about enthusiastic support for a candidate known for having a particularly loudly opinionated base versus begrudging support for a candidate whose base isn’t super happy with him.

Polls are going to show that Trump has more support in that context regardless of the truth if it’s anywhere remotely close to the level of support for Biden.

Because the reality of polling is that most of the pool of calls you’re getting your sample from are no answers, hung up during intro, endless voicemail, or straight up refusals. Completes make up a tiny portion of phone surveys.

Less incentive to waste time, more ability to focus on work, and a population suddenly increasing their potential time as consumers by 50%? The capitalists should be drooling over it as much as the socialists. It’s like increasing the population of some markets by half for free without any additional housing costs.

And it helps with unemployment and makes more of the population productive.