So, how many are getting paycuts this year? Things aren't/haven't ever been suited for me to be a job hopper, and as always that seems to be the only way to have your salary meaningfully keep up with inflation.
CPI tracks retail costs and the cost of living, whereas PPI tracks wholesale costs. As such, PPI acts as an early indicator of future consumer inflation.
Even more precisely, CPI tracks what someone has decided the average person would buy, and its basket of products is often tweaked to present more palatable numbers; it makes comparison of prices and inflation across years pretty much impossible.
The real inflation value a person experiences is often much greater than the cooked CPI figures.
> its basket of products is often tweaked to present more palatable numbers
This is a common conspiracy with scant evidence. The tweaks go in multiple directions and are better explained by the decoupling of PPI and CPI (due to longer and more-international supply chains) than conspiracy.
> it makes comparison of prices and inflation across years pretty much impossible
You can decompile the underlying statistics. Enterprises hire in-house economists to do this regularly.
For consumers, I'd say this is pretty selly, as is relying on nonsense like ShadowStats. Comparing value across long periods of time is almost fundamentally a fool's errand. What's an iPhone worth to someone in 1950? Between zero and a commanding fraction of global GDP.
though I am seeing ( work with distributors ) a lot less reluctance to raise prices or adjust. It took a while but many of my customers can now more easily reprice their catalog and customers getting used to it, so maybe its less of a lag as before
Awful news for everybody, particularly those in speculative tech jobs.
We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.
What makes this appalling is that the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.
I know there will be a lot of commenters rushing in to breathlessly claim 'Inflation was worse under Biden!'. However, there is a difference between inflation being the result of a literal 'once a 100 year' global pandemic and Trump deciding to attack Iran because he needed to remove attention from his involvement in the Epstein files.
As a summary
* Jan 2025 - Inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%
* Jan 2026 - Inflation at 2.4%
* 30th Jan 2026 - DOJ releases the first major batch (3 million files) of Epstein files. Numerous mention of Donald Trump in the files are immediately highlighted. Trump rants and rails, calling it a 'witch hunt'
* Feb 2026 - New York times releases a bombshell report documenting that Trump appeared in the files 5300 times. [1]
* Mid Feb 2026 - Trump starts ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran
* 28th Feb 2026 - US attacks Iran
* June 2026 - Avg gas prices over $4, US CPI at 4.2% and rising rapidly. The PPI numbers in the article referenced by OP show that this is only going to get worse.
> the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.
A choice that was given to at least 5 presidents before him, and they all recognized how stupid it would be. This president, though, is so infatuated with people he thinks are powerful, that he'll do anything they say, hoping they'll consider him to be one of them.
It was clear the “plan” was take control of Venezuelan oil, Iranian oil, and make Cuba a resort paradise for the rich American upper class, like God intended.
From what I understand, there's a very good chance that Venezuelan forces of some kind collaborated on that—possibly to the point of delivering Maduro gift-wrapped.
A literal toddler for president. Swings his dick around and manages to fuck up global supply chains. Now he is back online talking about invading Iran and taking all of its oil infrastructure.
I'm reminded of a Simpson's episode where Arnold Shwarzenegger is elected as President, given 5 stacks of papers with briefs of options, and he picks one at random without reading it saying "I was elected to lead, not to read!"
To get excessively pedantic, he walks very poorly. Toddles around. So his gait makes him a literal toddler. All 1 & 2 year olds toddle, but not all who toddle are 1 or 2 years old.
And IIRC tons of FBI employees combed over the files in 2025 likely to remove Trump or Trump and allies at the cost of millions of dollars. And even after that he's still all over them so imagine what was in there originally.
Possible the everything bubble propping up unprofitable tech buying up resources across the supply chain to build infrastructure + tariff inflation + war of choice energy inflation + massive federal spending + unwillingness to hike rates to cool things off ?
Good chance we run the COVID inflation all over again
We are not at a point as a country to have a serious discussion about governance.
The administration in charge (as recently as yesterday) still blames Biden for issues happening on their watch, even though he hasn’t been in officer for 16 months now.
This is not an administration serious about governing, and until we have an administration serious about governing and taking responsibility for their actions, we will continue to have this situation where half the country blames the half not in power for decisions it is making.
Congress of course is somehow worse, as instead of treating the executive like a branch of government they are meant to have oversight of, they abdicate their oversight role and roll over to the wishes of the present administration.
The net effect is those of us that live paycheck to paycheck (which is 2/3rds of Americans) are caught in the middle of a situation that would be deemed fantastical and not realistic to write about if it was described in a dystopian novel.
The Iran war continues with no oversight from Congress, and no authorized war while we pay the price. Vote them all out.
Trump blames Biden for January 6th. When, you know, Trump was president and Biden had not yet assumed office. Dude is simply constitutionally incapable of being a serious person.
Vote out the Republican fascists actually abdicating responsibility. Dems can't do anything when they don't control legislature. Don't end up bothsidesing the last sentene when the rest of your comment is about the iffectualness of Trump and Republicans
It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.
The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.
When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.
Their actions are recorded. You have full view if they are failing to do their job, and when they fail to do their job it is on you as their employer to bring the consequences. What did the people who hired John Fetterman do to stop his unacceptable behaviour? Nothing, right? That's the problem. Employees are not magical beings. They are simple, imperfect humans that need constant management. But there is this strange idea that voting is sufficient to act as the management layer. That is not how it works. Voting is only for selecting the employee you want to hire. You still have the be the employer after they are hired.
It is not fundamentally broken. The model proves to work perfectly fine in other contexts regularly. The trouble is that you, along with a lot of other people, are looking for magic so that you don't have to get your hands dirty. The harsh reality is that magic doesn't exist, I'm afraid.
It's corrupted by money, bribery, gerrymandering, an electoral system that is anti-democratic, and a two party system that has as a joint monolopy on power via division.
It is broken. As we already discussed, the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer. They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory. That doesn't happen in the real world. Employees need management. Always have, always will.
It is not fundamentally broken. It is fixable by the people stepping up and doing what an employer needs to do. The reluctance to want to roll up sleeves is understandable, but magic doesn't exist. It is either let the employees run wild or stand up and manage them. Your choice.
> the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer
Ok I'm an employer, and voting is my superpower. So I guess I just need to vote for the ones that aren't corrupt and that'll fix it? Too easy. Help me out though because I don't want to screw this up...who exactly do I need to vote for to fix our broken systems?
> They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory.
Wait a minute...voting isn't enough? I also need to dedicate my life to this? Ok what should I do? Run for office? Volunteer at a campaign? Whose campaign? Go to DC and protest? Lie down on the freeway? Post my thoughts on r/politics? Wait does this HN post count? Am I fixing our corrupt country right now? This is easy!
No, being the boss is your superpower. Selecting an employee to hire isn't all that important. There will never be a magical genie that grants all your wishes to choose from, just simple, imperfect humans that require constant management. Like, maybe don't pick a 'vegetable' that you cannot talk to if one shows up in the applicant pool, because you will need to talk to your employee regularly to convey what you expect of them and scold them when they screw up. It is still worth some of your time to flip through the resumes. But the reality is that of the average people who generally apply for the job, any will do as well as any other. None of them will be the ideal candidate.
> voting isn't enough?
Has hiring an employee and then cutting them loose ever been enough? Have you never had a job before? If you have, did your employer, after telling you that you got the job, disappear into the night, never to be heard from again? For those who have had jobs, the answer is an obvious: No, of course not. Why would this job somehow be different? It wouldn't be, obviously. You haven't hired a magical genie. Magic doesn't exist.
> I also need to dedicate my life to this?
No, you don't have to. The employees are generally willing to dutifully show up and do something. But if you don't stay in regular communication with them as to communicate what it is you want and expect out of them they'll be left to guess. They are certainly not mind readers. How could they know what you are thinking if you don't tell them? So, no, you don't have to, but you are not going to like the results if you don't get involved.
> Wait does this HN post count?
Do you mean count as a distraction that is taking you away from your duties as an employer? Sure. If you owned a McDonalds, would posting on HN complaining that the burgers at your establishment are coming out raw fix anything? Stranger things have happened, but I expect the odds are exceedingly low. Why would you come to HN to vent your frustrations instead of talking to the employees that aren't doing their job properly?
Ok so how exactly do I do this? That's what I'm asking. I'm trying to get your concrete recommendation here. What does "be the boss" mean? How do I actually do it?
Keep in mind that Trump was hired by the slate of electors you chose to hire. You did not choose him yourself. While ultimately all employees in your business are your responsibility, it is best for you to focus on the high ranking individuals, not the low-rung peons that are doing the busywork. First step is to call up the middle manager electors you hired directly and ask "What the hell?" They can worry about pushing things forward after that. Your role is to lead, not do everything.
In addition, you also directly hired a representative and a senator, tasked with keeping the rank and file employee in line. If they are not doing that, you also need to call them up and ask "What the hell?" If the phone is not your thing, visit their office. You are paying good money as their employer to give them an office. Don't be afraid to step foot in it. Your company directory gives the office location and phone number, in case your memory happens to be short and you've forgotten how to contact the person you hired already.
From there, it is a case by case basis. Every employee is going to have their own quirks and you have to learn how to work with them. But, I mean, they're just regular humans. You treat them like you would any other employee. If you owned a McDonalds location, you'd have to deal with imperfect humans just the same. This is no different.
If all this still is beyond your grasp, community colleges typically have management courses you can enrol in. Jumping straight in and doing it is usually the best way to learn, however. You might look like a fool the first time you engage with your employees, but who cares? By next year you'll be a seasoned pro. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now.
> If all this still is beyond your grasp, community colleges typically have management courses you can enrol in
You're taking this analogy too far. Managing an employee is not like electing a representative. We're not describing a boss-employee relationship here.
This motivational talk of "you have a superpower" and "you're the boss" all boiled down to one piece of concrete advice you gave: "call your representative". You've not given me anything else I can do with my high level management skills.
I admire your optimism, but I think we have enough evidence at this point to know that this is just not going to do it.
> Managing an employee is not like electing a representative. We're not describing a boss-employee relationship here.
Quite literally we are. I know it may not feel like it if you are accustomed to sitting back and letting the world crumble around you, but you are electing someone to work for you. What would the voting process be for if you didn't need anyone to do your bidding? Most importantly, why are you putting the elected on the payroll if you don't need them to work for you? Were you under the impression that they work for free?
> I think we have enough evidence at this point to know that this is just not going to do it.
If you don't like being called the boss, there's another word we use to describe participating in democracy: Lobbying. I think we can reasonably conclude that it does work because those who push a dictatorial agenda always cry about how the lobbyists (i.e. those who take time to talk to the workers) actually get things done — just not the things they imagine would get done if there was one all knowing, all powerful supreme dictator. Plus we know it works because we can see it in every other walk of life. The people don't become space aliens when the word government is thrown into the mix. People are people are people.
I get this desire for magic, but magic doesn't exist.
> there's another word we use to describe participating in democracy: Lobbying
And there's another word we can use to describe Lobbying: Bribery.
Lobbying is a (corrupt) industry and I'm not a participant in it, so unfortunately I'm still down to "call your representative".
The system really doesn't work as you say. Representatives don't respond to what their constituents want. They respond to money and and power. That's not democracy.
Which is literally lobbying, which you refuse to participate in, so that leaves accepting that all your great thoughts will be forever stuck in your head. The person you hired to work with your thoughts is most definitely not a mind reader.
> They respond to money and and power.
Money and power is not some fundamental property of the universe. It is only social. It is given to whom the people want to give it to. So, if the money and power isn't directed where you want to see it, give money and power to someone else.
> That's not democracy.
Right. Democracy takes place when you make yourself heard, by actually talking to people, not computers, about what you feel needs to be heard, while holding the representatives accountable if they do not do their job. So far you appear to be doing neither. If democracy isn't your thing, that's fine. The neat thing about democracy is if you don't like it and choose not to participate, it naturally turns into the only alternative, so everyone wins — except those who cling to the idea of magic. Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist.
> Which is literally lobbying, which you refuse to participate in, so that leaves accepting that all your great thoughts will be forever stuck in your head
It's literally not possible to fix a corrupt system by asking a participant in it to change the system that benefits them.
> Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist.
You are under the illusion that we operate under a functional democracy that responds to the will of the people. It's you that believes in magic, not me.
> You are under the illusion that we operate under a functional democracy that responds to the will of the people
If that were the case we wouldn't have spent time talking about how it is broken, nor would we have spent time talking about what needs to be done to fix it. However, like you said, when you benefit from the system there is no incentive to change.
To those reading this who are not winners under the status quo, know that you can change. The power is in your hands. Don't let the propagandists try to convince you that it is hopeless. As they suggest themselves, only those who want to keep things the same seek preservation.
> If that were the case we wouldn't have spent time talking about how it is broken
You've done exactly the opposite. All you've done is defend the system and cast blame at the "bosses" for not doing their job.
> The power is in your hands.
There you go again.
Please update this thread when you put your money where your mouth is and make a real difference. Then all those reading this can be inspired by your actions rather than your empty words.
The problem as I see it is more about a real habit of blaming the other side and keeping problems alive as wedge issues than actually solving anything. This was a problem before, and always has been to some extent, but seems to have gotten much worse since social media and twitter became ways for memes to spread virally. So much easier to get outraged about something the other guy is or is not doing, than to do the work to come up with any solutions. And the country is pretty evenly divided on which side they like, so we're just treading water in sewage mostly.
Exploiting wedge issues is how the game of politics is played, isn't it? This has been the playbook forever. Find (or create) an enemy (real or imaginary) and rally supporters against them and keep the wedges/enemies in place, so it can be exploited forever. This is true nearly in all democracies. It would be nice if it wasn't but somehow politics generally seems to attract/promote the worst people in society.
Agree. There's a direct line from Robert A Heinlein:
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
to the anonymous scholar who first said, probably as a joke:
"If violence didn't work you didn't use enough".
Whatever you think of voting and democracy, the alternatives are far more unpleasant. Vote every time, without fail.
How does more voting resolve anything? Split up fans are still split opinions and bad politicians are still bad politicians. A 51 49 election still has the same outcome if 10 million or 100 million people voted. It seems to me that people will need to not only vote but change their voting criteria
I'm specifically thinking of the primaries here, where you often have more than two candidates and it's not a 51/49 split. I think it's very likely that the people who currently sit out the primaries would vote differently from the people who show up. It's a pretty small minority who vote in primaries, and those who do will tend to be a lot more politically active than average.
Far too many people complain about the bad candidates in the general, and don't do the most basic thing to influence that.
The ancient Athenians knew that elections favored the rich. That’s why they incorporated selection by lot into their system. Our modern understanding of democracy has fetishized elections to the point that some voters might see hundreds of them in a year, including for positions that shouldn’t ever be elected (e.g. judges), while still having little to no actual civic power.
> How will you get selection by lot into the current system without violence? Voting
Oh totally agree. But also civic involvement. The returns to even small amounts of civic engagement in America are so ridiculously high because most of the population doesn’t do it. If like 5% more of the electorate called their electeds at least twice a year, that would represent a 25% increase in civic engagement, enough to break constituencies.
I think the Athenians named our current system an oligarchy. Selection by lot would take a lot of the corrupting influence of money out of the system too. There would need to be safeguards though, similar to how juries are protected during a trial.
I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.
I've thought a lot about this, because my state is heavily gerrymandered, and the legislature keeps voting to undermine several recently passed amendments (abortion rights, marijuana) to our state constitution. They also tried to change the threshold for passing a referendum from 50% + 1 vote to 60%, when it was clear that there was enough support to pass the abortion rights amendment.
You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Fuck what the professional politicians think of sortition; do an end run around them, because professional politicians are the problem.
Get this accomplished in enough states, and then you have a level chance of doing an amendment to the US Constitution.
> You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Aka...voting.
If you truly believe "voting doesn't work", as you first said (EDIT: that was someone else whose username starts with a "b" sorry), then this referendum won't go anywhere either.
But I would say that the voting that matters most is voting in primaries. Get rid of the ideologues and zealots on both sides; get some people who can think rather than just yell.
> There's a lot of thoughtful responses to your histrionics
Sorry, can you please point to one of these thoughtful responses? I've seen one idea suggested: "sortition". But no ideas for how to get it peacefully without voting it in. I engaged with all these comments and asked this question.
"Voting doesn't work" is a cynical, doomerist, thought terminating cliche. I don't want this mind virus to propagate. You may call my comments "histrionics". But instead I suggest you take a breath and think about where calling voting and elections "useless" leads.
"Democracy" is a hugely wide category some variant of it is likely the preferred system of governance. Regardless, it's a weasel category. Many would argue that China is democratically reflecting the will of their people.
In fact, Von Mises famously argued in his seminal work Liberalism that all systems are democratic because they require the will of the people or are overthrown. A little silly of a reductio in my opinion, but it's emblematic.
The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama. It is impossible to make meaningful change anymore.
Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.
The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process
It's interesting how you elect to name two presidents in an era that were democrats while conveniently omitting the republican president in between. With all his baggages, I find this quite convenient.
It's an interesting point. With Clinton, l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public as a means of congressional focus. It should be noted that until then, this was effectively off limits. It was an open secret in DC that his predecessor, Bush the 1st, kept a mistress for years and that was never discussed publicly.
In the case of Obama, the GOP noted that their top priority was to make him a 1-term president and that meant attempted sabotage of any legislation that might make him look good.
Neither man were perfect presidents, but compared to the current regime it is night and day.
The Lewinsky Affair got traction because Clinton used his position of power (literally in the Oval Office) to take advantage of a young subordinate, in a time when ‘sexual harassment’ was becoming a hot topic. Then lying about the affair made it much worse (as cover-ups often do). It was definitely used against Clinton by his opponents, but the way he abused his position, then perjured himself was truly shameful.
Clinton as a sex pest is a more recent narrative. At the time the media coverage was not about how he was abusing an intern. It was about how he was debasing the office and how Lewinsky wasn't even that hot. It was certainly not the narrative from the right that Clinton was an abuser.
I purposely avoided any comparison between Clinton and other presidents, as many have done bad things, and it is difficult to rank them all. I just wanted to address the parent comment's minimization of Clinton's wrong-doing, as evidenced by this quote: "l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public"
What Clinton did was absolutely wrong, but that was a personal affair.
In life and the law, intentions are foundational for evaluating people's actions.
The scandalizing of Clinton's behavior was only about political slander, mud slinging. Your pearl clutching is performative and partisan.
There's so much to not like about the Dems, and it's primarily in the fact that DNC leadership is corrupt and they are only interested in serving themselves and their patrons. But the party members as a whole do work on trying to do good governance. They often fail, but on the intentions front, it's not disagreable.
Counter this to the modern day GOP -- they've been coopted by the evangelicals and white nationalists, and the only thing they want to govern is demanding that their theology is the law of the land. No thank you.
I have respect for old-school conservatives who cared about limited government -- I totally agree with that concept but differ on how those limits are set.
I have no party affiliation and loath partisan politics, but with the two-party system one has to choose the least worst.
Dating in the workplace is usually a bad idea, especially if it's a manager and an underling because the power dynamics get fucked up.
But in the case of the Clinton affair, it was effectively personal (Bill, Monica, Hillary) -- their business.
Please explain how this impacted Clinton's ability to execute his job, or how that dynamic hurt Lewinsky in such a way that it needed to be a national affair?
This is the same kind of feigned moral panic over Hunter Biden's business dealings -- designed solely to smear the president for their opponents political gain.
Edit: as a counter point, Trump fucking a porn star months after his son was born was technically between him, Stormy, and Melania. The reason that it was worthy of public scrutiny was that he committed campaign finance fraud with the hush money. Ironically, no pearls were clutched by his supporters over that.
Clinton damaged the White House intern program by making it look like they were either his harem or victims; having an affair in his office also made it look like he was more interested in using his position to cheat on his wife than do his job. It was at least a distraction, and probably more of a handicap. If he wanted to have sex with Lewinsky, he should have waited until she left the internship, and done it in the Residence.
I purposely avoided comparing Clinton to anyone else, so whatever horrible things Trump has done is just changing the subject. I personally believe that neither of them has committed (anything approximating) the most abhorrent acts by a POTUS, but that's a different conversation.
This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse".
When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war.
When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system.
When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Reagan also perfected the process of:
1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient.
2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding.
3. Government programs get worse as a result.
4. Goto 1.
He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since.
> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point
I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.
I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.
More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.
Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.
Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.
Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.
I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.
I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.
The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.
If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.
In the attention economy I think there is still plenty of blame to assign to the voters.. they are the ones that care more about culture war topics then the peace and prosperity of their children.
I mean, I also have times where I find myself blaming people for being so stupid.
That said, you have to realize that this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades. Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort and the outcomes are predictable.
> this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades
There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
> Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort
Historically untrue. Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
> There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
Hmm, not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years.
The media influences alone that fuel the sensationalization of these issues are transparent, as are the threads that bind these media groups and those in power over them.
Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example.
> Historically untrue.
What? In what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Almost by definition the successful grassroots movements of the past that have created change were organized, no? I also don't believe there's ever been as effective a media (social and conventional) apparatus in human history as we've had the last half century.
> Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
I mean, this conversation started over the culture war bullshit that seems to have about as good a grip on Americans' attention as ever, although I agree that the material economic conditions are degrading so badly that they are more and more becoming the priority consideration.
That said, channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction.
> not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years
Because for each of these there are a hundred other monied interests, and they're all in covert or open conflict with each other.
> Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example
Yes, that's one group overtly taking over a platform. The fact that they're behaving differently after Weiss should give pause to the hypothesis that this is all already co-ordinated from the shadows.
> what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Every regime fighting survivial deploys all means available to it in its fight. That includes the media. Disorganised groups have overturned concentratios of power far more pronounced than what we have in the U.S. (We have high inequality. But our elite is still usefully fractured.)
> channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction
Here I agree. But there are also powerful immigrant-born Americans and Jewish Americans who obviously don't want to be part of that, and who have influence over money, power and media.
Everyone is trying to consolidate power. But that's an exclusionary imperative. Hence, political competition.
> The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama.
Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.
If you look at recent data[1], this has only accelerated further. This was not attributable to one president. Attempting to point blame for complex economic systems to one person is so foolish I don't even know where to start picking it apart. Look at the actual legislation and actions by which this happens. This is done through tariff manipulation, regulatory capture, and insider trading which we literally have weekly evidence of.
You are leaving out there was a global epidemic happening at the time, it's easier to see the logic of a global crisis which shutdown the global economy creating inflationary pressure from both supply economics, and mitigations taken by governments to keep money circulating (as much as we can disagree if it was the correct measure, it's understandable).
What is understandable about the current causes of inflation?
> It's almost as if the choice between the two parties is no choice at all.
Hi, I live in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. You may have heard about what the Republicans in the federal government did here a couple of months ago! The only appropriate response to your sentiment would, rightly, get me banned from this website. Please think before you speak.
For those who just watch fox news we're up to an estimated 700 million dollars of damage, completely aside from the human suffering for no definable reasons. The murders and the justification for murders, the protecting of murderers, and the celebration of convicted murderers in the local MN GOP.
What relevance does that have to this discussion of the executive branch causing willful damage? It just sounds like you are trying to say that its either false, misleading, or just a place where that happens so why give a shit.
None of those really seem like worthwhile to bring to this discussion.
> Didn't we have even higher inflation under the last president
“The index for final demand goods moved up 2.8 percent in May, the largest increase since data were first calculated in December 2009.”
Granted, that’s a slice of an index. But it promotes a pattern: we’re heading into a place similar to 2022. Then, because of money printing (at the time blamed on supply-chain disruptions). This time, because of money printing amidst an engineered supply-chain disruption.
The takeaway is we’ve had a string of shit-for-brain Presidents since Obama.
He allowed allowed the destruction of Gaza to start, and did nothing to stop it even when it was clear what was happening and it was within his power to do so. Of course, Trump would have been no better on that front. But that brings us back to...
Until the press and the public do not examine the real long term strategies of the US establishment, this won't change.
All you hear is reporting about Trump's daily contradictory statements, "leaks" in Axios that peace in Iran is imminent, then 40 tomahawk missiles. Next are probably fake peace talks again.
Until the press grasps that the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur. The US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports.
The US population is suffering collateral damage. The billionaires are willing to take that sacrifice.
> the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur
This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.
> US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports
Americans want lots of things. Current policy isn’t promoting those interests. Currently, the war in Iran is causing long-term demand destruction for the sort of energy products America exports among our allies.
> This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.
That is the intended perception because the public figures are imbeciles. The people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies" has been a priority issue since Reagan blew up a Soviet pipeline to Germany.
Or make the starting point the Suez Crisis when the US unseated Britain in the Middle East and took over.
> people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies"
What’s your evidence? Because nothing done recently has supported American hegemony, even among our allies. Many of whom yes, are buying a bit more from us energywise, but a lot more from others all while accelerating decarbonisarion.
It’s always nice to think someone is in charge. The truth is modern societies are too complex to control in this cartoonish manner for any meaningful durations. People who convince themselves it is and wind up in power demonstrate the folly of that worldview repeatedly.
There are no long term strategies, neither the "establishment" nor the public (ie you) seem to grasp that simple fact.
Americans simply do not wish to engage with reality any more, and that's why they're perfectly happy to elect a TV personality for a president who filled his cabinet with TV personalities who can do nothing more than LARP as statesmen.
I think your comment is another instance of this LARP, where the public can't tell the difference between reality and TV.
This is what worries me about the AI productivity boom vs previous tech/industrial productivity booms..
We've already made most consumer goods cheap.
The goods/services that are more inflation tied - food, transport, medicine, housing, and education.. are those tethered tied to physical world where costs are driven by energy, regulatory issues, and skilled domestic labor.
- You couldn't buy continous glucose monitors, OTC hearing aids, home heart monitors using your cellphone or watch or countless medications that didn't exist in 2017 (eg. Journavx, the first non-opiod pain med, smart insulin pens, etc.).
- You couldn't buy noise-cancelling earbuds, generative AI, somewhat affordable electric vehicles, PT and medical advice from Youtube/AI, self driving vehicles, more reliable electricity from grid-scale store, Satellite rescue from your cellphone, etc.
The retort will be daily items are about 30% more expensive since Covid. This is the result of Federal and State policies that have little to do with the White House and everything to do with Congress and State Houses. As just one example... ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?
California has 4 seasons of growing weather, good soil, and conditions that help against rot. The lack of water is exactly why it's good for growing stuff, if you can get the water. Excess water ruins crops all the time.
This comment that seems determined to state its conclusion without providing any evidence other than “why is so much agriculture in parts of the country that are conducive to agriculture”.
So, how many are getting paycuts this year? Things aren't/haven't ever been suited for me to be a job hopper, and as always that seems to be the only way to have your salary meaningfully keep up with inflation.
CPI vs PPI, in case you’re curious like me …
CPI tracks retail costs and the cost of living, whereas PPI tracks wholesale costs. As such, PPI acts as an early indicator of future consumer inflation.
More precisely, CPI tracks what you buy. Even if it’s imported. PPI tracks what’s produced here, even if for export.
There is a fun Canadian paper on how they started intensely decoupling after 2001, alongside the rise of global multi-step supply chains [1].
[1] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/261258/1/swp2022-05....
Even more precisely, CPI tracks what someone has decided the average person would buy, and its basket of products is often tweaked to present more palatable numbers; it makes comparison of prices and inflation across years pretty much impossible.
The real inflation value a person experiences is often much greater than the cooked CPI figures.
> its basket of products is often tweaked to present more palatable numbers
This is a common conspiracy with scant evidence. The tweaks go in multiple directions and are better explained by the decoupling of PPI and CPI (due to longer and more-international supply chains) than conspiracy.
> it makes comparison of prices and inflation across years pretty much impossible
You can decompile the underlying statistics. Enterprises hire in-house economists to do this regularly.
For consumers, I'd say this is pretty selly, as is relying on nonsense like ShadowStats. Comparing value across long periods of time is almost fundamentally a fool's errand. What's an iPhone worth to someone in 1950? Between zero and a commanding fraction of global GDP.
though I am seeing ( work with distributors ) a lot less reluctance to raise prices or adjust. It took a while but many of my customers can now more easily reprice their catalog and customers getting used to it, so maybe its less of a lag as before
Awful news for everybody, particularly those in speculative tech jobs.
We may well look back at the attack on Iran as the American tipping point that caused the same kind of financial stagnation as Brexit caused for the UK.
It's crazy that now the main goal of the war is to open a strait that was already open before the war.
The main goal was to destroy the US. Its so painfully obvious that you really have to be deep into whatever you’re into to not see it.
We have voluntarily recreated the effects of the worst supply side disruption in modern history that happened after the pandemic.
What makes this appalling is that the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.
I know there will be a lot of commenters rushing in to breathlessly claim 'Inflation was worse under Biden!'. However, there is a difference between inflation being the result of a literal 'once a 100 year' global pandemic and Trump deciding to attack Iran because he needed to remove attention from his involvement in the Epstein files.
As a summary
* Jan 2025 - Inflation when Trump took office was 2.9%
* Jan 2026 - Inflation at 2.4%
* 30th Jan 2026 - DOJ releases the first major batch (3 million files) of Epstein files. Numerous mention of Donald Trump in the files are immediately highlighted. Trump rants and rails, calling it a 'witch hunt'
* Feb 2026 - New York times releases a bombshell report documenting that Trump appeared in the files 5300 times. [1]
* Mid Feb 2026 - Trump starts ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran
* 28th Feb 2026 - US attacks Iran
* June 2026 - Avg gas prices over $4, US CPI at 4.2% and rising rapidly. The PPI numbers in the article referenced by OP show that this is only going to get worse.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/us/trump-epstein-files.ht...
> the current situation is entirely the result of deliberate choice by the president.
A choice that was given to at least 5 presidents before him, and they all recognized how stupid it would be. This president, though, is so infatuated with people he thinks are powerful, that he'll do anything they say, hoping they'll consider him to be one of them.
And this doesn't even include tariffs...
* Jan 8 2026 Iran begins the longest internet blackout in universal world history due to massive protests over economic issues.
The fact that he could kidnap Maduro probably gave him false confidence that waltzing into Iran might work out. Alas, for us.
It was clear the “plan” was take control of Venezuelan oil, Iranian oil, and make Cuba a resort paradise for the rich American upper class, like God intended.
From what I understand, there's a very good chance that Venezuelan forces of some kind collaborated on that—possibly to the point of delivering Maduro gift-wrapped.
A literal toddler for president. Swings his dick around and manages to fuck up global supply chains. Now he is back online talking about invading Iran and taking all of its oil infrastructure.
No. A figurative toddler.
A literal toddler would be one to two years old.
I have five figures of karma with which to fight this battle.
A literal toddler is one who can read.
I'm reminded of a Simpson's episode where Arnold Shwarzenegger is elected as President, given 5 stacks of papers with briefs of options, and he picks one at random without reading it saying "I was elected to lead, not to read!"
To get excessively pedantic, he walks very poorly. Toddles around. So his gait makes him a literal toddler. All 1 & 2 year olds toddle, but not all who toddle are 1 or 2 years old.
And IIRC tons of FBI employees combed over the files in 2025 likely to remove Trump or Trump and allies at the cost of millions of dollars. And even after that he's still all over them so imagine what was in there originally.
Possible the everything bubble propping up unprofitable tech buying up resources across the supply chain to build infrastructure + tariff inflation + war of choice energy inflation + massive federal spending + unwillingness to hike rates to cool things off ?
Good chance we run the COVID inflation all over again
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We are not at a point as a country to have a serious discussion about governance.
The administration in charge (as recently as yesterday) still blames Biden for issues happening on their watch, even though he hasn’t been in officer for 16 months now.
This is not an administration serious about governing, and until we have an administration serious about governing and taking responsibility for their actions, we will continue to have this situation where half the country blames the half not in power for decisions it is making.
Congress of course is somehow worse, as instead of treating the executive like a branch of government they are meant to have oversight of, they abdicate their oversight role and roll over to the wishes of the present administration.
The net effect is those of us that live paycheck to paycheck (which is 2/3rds of Americans) are caught in the middle of a situation that would be deemed fantastical and not realistic to write about if it was described in a dystopian novel.
The Iran war continues with no oversight from Congress, and no authorized war while we pay the price. Vote them all out.
Trump blames Biden for January 6th. When, you know, Trump was president and Biden had not yet assumed office. Dude is simply constitutionally incapable of being a serious person.
Vote out the Republican fascists actually abdicating responsibility. Dems can't do anything when they don't control legislature. Don't end up bothsidesing the last sentene when the rest of your comment is about the iffectualness of Trump and Republicans
The problem runs deeper than the current administration. Voting doesn't work.
The Biden administration isn't the antidote to our problems.
> Voting doesn't work.
It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.
The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.
When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.
Incorrect.
You can merely lie and spend money and get elected and then do the opposite. Rinse and repeat.
See: John Fetterman.
It doesn't work. It's fundamentally broken.
Their actions are recorded. You have full view if they are failing to do their job, and when they fail to do their job it is on you as their employer to bring the consequences. What did the people who hired John Fetterman do to stop his unacceptable behaviour? Nothing, right? That's the problem. Employees are not magical beings. They are simple, imperfect humans that need constant management. But there is this strange idea that voting is sufficient to act as the management layer. That is not how it works. Voting is only for selecting the employee you want to hire. You still have the be the employer after they are hired.
It is not fundamentally broken. The model proves to work perfectly fine in other contexts regularly. The trouble is that you, along with a lot of other people, are looking for magic so that you don't have to get your hands dirty. The harsh reality is that magic doesn't exist, I'm afraid.
> It is not fundamentally broken
It's corrupted by money, bribery, gerrymandering, an electoral system that is anti-democratic, and a two party system that has as a joint monolopy on power via division.
Corrupt means broken.
It is broken. As we already discussed, the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer. They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory. That doesn't happen in the real world. Employees need management. Always have, always will.
It is not fundamentally broken. It is fixable by the people stepping up and doing what an employer needs to do. The reluctance to want to roll up sleeves is understandable, but magic doesn't exist. It is either let the employees run wild or stand up and manage them. Your choice.
> the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer
Ok I'm an employer, and voting is my superpower. So I guess I just need to vote for the ones that aren't corrupt and that'll fix it? Too easy. Help me out though because I don't want to screw this up...who exactly do I need to vote for to fix our broken systems?
> They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory.
Wait a minute...voting isn't enough? I also need to dedicate my life to this? Ok what should I do? Run for office? Volunteer at a campaign? Whose campaign? Go to DC and protest? Lie down on the freeway? Post my thoughts on r/politics? Wait does this HN post count? Am I fixing our corrupt country right now? This is easy!
> voting is my superpower.
No, being the boss is your superpower. Selecting an employee to hire isn't all that important. There will never be a magical genie that grants all your wishes to choose from, just simple, imperfect humans that require constant management. Like, maybe don't pick a 'vegetable' that you cannot talk to if one shows up in the applicant pool, because you will need to talk to your employee regularly to convey what you expect of them and scold them when they screw up. It is still worth some of your time to flip through the resumes. But the reality is that of the average people who generally apply for the job, any will do as well as any other. None of them will be the ideal candidate.
> voting isn't enough?
Has hiring an employee and then cutting them loose ever been enough? Have you never had a job before? If you have, did your employer, after telling you that you got the job, disappear into the night, never to be heard from again? For those who have had jobs, the answer is an obvious: No, of course not. Why would this job somehow be different? It wouldn't be, obviously. You haven't hired a magical genie. Magic doesn't exist.
> I also need to dedicate my life to this?
No, you don't have to. The employees are generally willing to dutifully show up and do something. But if you don't stay in regular communication with them as to communicate what it is you want and expect out of them they'll be left to guess. They are certainly not mind readers. How could they know what you are thinking if you don't tell them? So, no, you don't have to, but you are not going to like the results if you don't get involved.
> Wait does this HN post count?
Do you mean count as a distraction that is taking you away from your duties as an employer? Sure. If you owned a McDonalds, would posting on HN complaining that the burgers at your establishment are coming out raw fix anything? Stranger things have happened, but I expect the odds are exceedingly low. Why would you come to HN to vent your frustrations instead of talking to the employees that aren't doing their job properly?
You're evading my questions...
> No, being the boss is your superpower
Ok so how exactly do I do this? That's what I'm asking. I'm trying to get your concrete recommendation here. What does "be the boss" mean? How do I actually do it?
Here's why I ask:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
Over half the country doesn't know what you know: they don't know how to use their superpower. So what are they missing?
> trump-approval-tracker
Keep in mind that Trump was hired by the slate of electors you chose to hire. You did not choose him yourself. While ultimately all employees in your business are your responsibility, it is best for you to focus on the high ranking individuals, not the low-rung peons that are doing the busywork. First step is to call up the middle manager electors you hired directly and ask "What the hell?" They can worry about pushing things forward after that. Your role is to lead, not do everything.
In addition, you also directly hired a representative and a senator, tasked with keeping the rank and file employee in line. If they are not doing that, you also need to call them up and ask "What the hell?" If the phone is not your thing, visit their office. You are paying good money as their employer to give them an office. Don't be afraid to step foot in it. Your company directory gives the office location and phone number, in case your memory happens to be short and you've forgotten how to contact the person you hired already.
From there, it is a case by case basis. Every employee is going to have their own quirks and you have to learn how to work with them. But, I mean, they're just regular humans. You treat them like you would any other employee. If you owned a McDonalds location, you'd have to deal with imperfect humans just the same. This is no different.
If all this still is beyond your grasp, community colleges typically have management courses you can enrol in. Jumping straight in and doing it is usually the best way to learn, however. You might look like a fool the first time you engage with your employees, but who cares? By next year you'll be a seasoned pro. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is now.
> If all this still is beyond your grasp, community colleges typically have management courses you can enrol in
You're taking this analogy too far. Managing an employee is not like electing a representative. We're not describing a boss-employee relationship here.
This motivational talk of "you have a superpower" and "you're the boss" all boiled down to one piece of concrete advice you gave: "call your representative". You've not given me anything else I can do with my high level management skills.
I admire your optimism, but I think we have enough evidence at this point to know that this is just not going to do it.
> Managing an employee is not like electing a representative. We're not describing a boss-employee relationship here.
Quite literally we are. I know it may not feel like it if you are accustomed to sitting back and letting the world crumble around you, but you are electing someone to work for you. What would the voting process be for if you didn't need anyone to do your bidding? Most importantly, why are you putting the elected on the payroll if you don't need them to work for you? Were you under the impression that they work for free?
> I think we have enough evidence at this point to know that this is just not going to do it.
If you don't like being called the boss, there's another word we use to describe participating in democracy: Lobbying. I think we can reasonably conclude that it does work because those who push a dictatorial agenda always cry about how the lobbyists (i.e. those who take time to talk to the workers) actually get things done — just not the things they imagine would get done if there was one all knowing, all powerful supreme dictator. Plus we know it works because we can see it in every other walk of life. The people don't become space aliens when the word government is thrown into the mix. People are people are people.
I get this desire for magic, but magic doesn't exist.
> there's another word we use to describe participating in democracy: Lobbying
And there's another word we can use to describe Lobbying: Bribery.
Lobbying is a (corrupt) industry and I'm not a participant in it, so unfortunately I'm still down to "call your representative".
The system really doesn't work as you say. Representatives don't respond to what their constituents want. They respond to money and and power. That's not democracy.
> I'm still down to "call your representative".
Which is literally lobbying, which you refuse to participate in, so that leaves accepting that all your great thoughts will be forever stuck in your head. The person you hired to work with your thoughts is most definitely not a mind reader.
> They respond to money and and power.
Money and power is not some fundamental property of the universe. It is only social. It is given to whom the people want to give it to. So, if the money and power isn't directed where you want to see it, give money and power to someone else.
> That's not democracy.
Right. Democracy takes place when you make yourself heard, by actually talking to people, not computers, about what you feel needs to be heard, while holding the representatives accountable if they do not do their job. So far you appear to be doing neither. If democracy isn't your thing, that's fine. The neat thing about democracy is if you don't like it and choose not to participate, it naturally turns into the only alternative, so everyone wins — except those who cling to the idea of magic. Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist.
> Which is literally lobbying, which you refuse to participate in, so that leaves accepting that all your great thoughts will be forever stuck in your head
It's literally not possible to fix a corrupt system by asking a participant in it to change the system that benefits them.
> Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist.
You are under the illusion that we operate under a functional democracy that responds to the will of the people. It's you that believes in magic, not me.
> You are under the illusion that we operate under a functional democracy that responds to the will of the people
If that were the case we wouldn't have spent time talking about how it is broken, nor would we have spent time talking about what needs to be done to fix it. However, like you said, when you benefit from the system there is no incentive to change.
To those reading this who are not winners under the status quo, know that you can change. The power is in your hands. Don't let the propagandists try to convince you that it is hopeless. As they suggest themselves, only those who want to keep things the same seek preservation.
> If that were the case we wouldn't have spent time talking about how it is broken
You've done exactly the opposite. All you've done is defend the system and cast blame at the "bosses" for not doing their job.
> The power is in your hands.
There you go again.
Please update this thread when you put your money where your mouth is and make a real difference. Then all those reading this can be inspired by your actions rather than your empty words.
The problem as I see it is more about a real habit of blaming the other side and keeping problems alive as wedge issues than actually solving anything. This was a problem before, and always has been to some extent, but seems to have gotten much worse since social media and twitter became ways for memes to spread virally. So much easier to get outraged about something the other guy is or is not doing, than to do the work to come up with any solutions. And the country is pretty evenly divided on which side they like, so we're just treading water in sewage mostly.
Exploiting wedge issues is how the game of politics is played, isn't it? This has been the playbook forever. Find (or create) an enemy (real or imaginary) and rally supporters against them and keep the wedges/enemies in place, so it can be exploited forever. This is true nearly in all democracies. It would be nice if it wasn't but somehow politics generally seems to attract/promote the worst people in society.
It is upto to the voters to see past this.
Voting works fine, people just don't do it very much.
People complain about their choices. Meanwhile, there's atrocious turnout in the primaries which determine those choices.
Agree. There's a direct line from Robert A Heinlein:
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
to the anonymous scholar who first said, probably as a joke:
"If violence didn't work you didn't use enough".
Whatever you think of voting and democracy, the alternatives are far more unpleasant. Vote every time, without fail.
How does more voting resolve anything? Split up fans are still split opinions and bad politicians are still bad politicians. A 51 49 election still has the same outcome if 10 million or 100 million people voted. It seems to me that people will need to not only vote but change their voting criteria
I'm specifically thinking of the primaries here, where you often have more than two candidates and it's not a 51/49 split. I think it's very likely that the people who currently sit out the primaries would vote differently from the people who show up. It's a pretty small minority who vote in primaries, and those who do will tend to be a lot more politically active than average.
Far too many people complain about the bad candidates in the general, and don't do the most basic thing to influence that.
Ah. One of the various forms of ranked choice or approval voting in the general would also solve this.
I agree that mixing of the party primary system and the governmental election process is a problem leading to dominance of finge views.
> Voting doesn't work
Disparaging democracy doesn't work. Saying shit like this is worse than not voting.
EDIT: Downvoted for defending democracy. I do love democracy :-D
> Disparaging democracy
The ancient Athenians knew that elections favored the rich. That’s why they incorporated selection by lot into their system. Our modern understanding of democracy has fetishized elections to the point that some voters might see hundreds of them in a year, including for positions that shouldn’t ever be elected (e.g. judges), while still having little to no actual civic power.
How will you get selection by lot into the current system without violence? Voting.
> How will you get selection by lot into the current system without violence? Voting
Oh totally agree. But also civic involvement. The returns to even small amounts of civic engagement in America are so ridiculously high because most of the population doesn’t do it. If like 5% more of the electorate called their electeds at least twice a year, that would represent a 25% increase in civic engagement, enough to break constituencies.
The "just vote" lot are the perfect pressure release valve for the failed system.
Out of control inflation? No healthcare? Endless war?
Just vote! You just have to vote for a democrat!
It's time to say no to these charlatans. If people lose hope in the system, that's when it can change.
> You just have to vote for a democrat!
Or a third party.
> If people lose hope in the system, that's when it can change
There's only 2 ways it can change: voting or violence. You're saying voting doesn't work. That means you're advocating violence.
> Just vote! You just have to vote for a democrat! It's time to say no to these charlatans.
Biased much? Why not say no to Republicans, they put us in this mess time and time again.
I think the Athenians named our current system an oligarchy. Selection by lot would take a lot of the corrupting influence of money out of the system too. There would need to be safeguards though, similar to how juries are protected during a trial.
I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.
Nah, voting doesn't work because to become a candidate necessarily requires backroom dealing at odds with the interests of common voters.
We need sortition.
How will you get sortition without voting for a pro-sortition candidate?
I've thought a lot about this, because my state is heavily gerrymandered, and the legislature keeps voting to undermine several recently passed amendments (abortion rights, marijuana) to our state constitution. They also tried to change the threshold for passing a referendum from 50% + 1 vote to 60%, when it was clear that there was enough support to pass the abortion rights amendment.
You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Fuck what the professional politicians think of sortition; do an end run around them, because professional politicians are the problem.
Get this accomplished in enough states, and then you have a level chance of doing an amendment to the US Constitution.
> You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Aka...voting.
If you truly believe "voting doesn't work", as you first said (EDIT: that was someone else whose username starts with a "b" sorry), then this referendum won't go anywhere either.
They didn’t say that! That was kitty Caligula.
Actually in this thread it was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48490568 but yeah the person I responded to isn't them either.
Kitty Caligula would have been a better name than DOGE.
Since many people reading this probably don't know: voting is not the only, or even the original form of democracy.
Representatives in ancient democracies were selected by sortition, which is based on statistics, not popularity or money.
The only way to peacefully change how representatives are selected is...voting.
Nobody voted in Kamala Harris and somehow she became the only choice besides Trump.
So then you agree with me that not being able to vote is catastrophic. "Voting doesn't work" rapidly gets you to "No votes for you."
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Saying it seems to have become a taboo, probably because of the existential horror of it possibly being true.
Is there an alternative?
Say the truth; take the downvotes.
But I would say that the voting that matters most is voting in primaries. Get rid of the ideologues and zealots on both sides; get some people who can think rather than just yell.
Agree. Voting doesn't just mean voting in regular elections for legislators and executives. Vote in every election you are eligible for.
Not doing anything is also not working. Denying it is worse than saying its broken. It's clear as day.
Key figures, wealth, etc. Shouldn't influence their power to this extend. The general public isn't silent, it's silenced.
It's at best a weak check by the populace on two rival gangs of the ruling class. It's certainly not what its proponents claim it to be.
I see, you prefer your gangs unchecked?
I clearly did not say that, re-read and try again.
There's a lot of thoughtful responses to your histrionics, I suggest you take a breath and actually engage with the ideas contained within them.
> There's a lot of thoughtful responses to your histrionics
Sorry, can you please point to one of these thoughtful responses? I've seen one idea suggested: "sortition". But no ideas for how to get it peacefully without voting it in. I engaged with all these comments and asked this question.
"Voting doesn't work" is a cynical, doomerist, thought terminating cliche. I don't want this mind virus to propagate. You may call my comments "histrionics". But instead I suggest you take a breath and think about where calling voting and elections "useless" leads.
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> Being a toady for what isn't working makes you useful
It's great you aren't a "toady".
> this system is broken and needs to be disparaged
And then what?
You're either being paid to spread this doomslop or you're just a bored, contrarian cynic. I really really hope it's the second one.
What's your suggested alternative? Would you say that American democracy is broken or democracy in general?
"Democracy" is a hugely wide category some variant of it is likely the preferred system of governance. Regardless, it's a weasel category. Many would argue that China is democratically reflecting the will of their people.
In fact, Von Mises famously argued in his seminal work Liberalism that all systems are democratic because they require the will of the people or are overthrown. A little silly of a reductio in my opinion, but it's emblematic.
So, to repeat, what is your suggested alternative?
The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama. It is impossible to make meaningful change anymore.
Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.
The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process
It's interesting how you elect to name two presidents in an era that were democrats while conveniently omitting the republican president in between. With all his baggages, I find this quite convenient.
It's an interesting point. With Clinton, l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public as a means of congressional focus. It should be noted that until then, this was effectively off limits. It was an open secret in DC that his predecessor, Bush the 1st, kept a mistress for years and that was never discussed publicly.
In the case of Obama, the GOP noted that their top priority was to make him a 1-term president and that meant attempted sabotage of any legislation that might make him look good.
Neither man were perfect presidents, but compared to the current regime it is night and day.
The Lewinsky Affair got traction because Clinton used his position of power (literally in the Oval Office) to take advantage of a young subordinate, in a time when ‘sexual harassment’ was becoming a hot topic. Then lying about the affair made it much worse (as cover-ups often do). It was definitely used against Clinton by his opponents, but the way he abused his position, then perjured himself was truly shameful.
Clinton as a sex pest is a more recent narrative. At the time the media coverage was not about how he was abusing an intern. It was about how he was debasing the office and how Lewinsky wasn't even that hot. It was certainly not the narrative from the right that Clinton was an abuser.
Ironic because Trump said (and did) far worse things in 2016 and didn’t affect him one bit
I purposely avoided any comparison between Clinton and other presidents, as many have done bad things, and it is difficult to rank them all. I just wanted to address the parent comment's minimization of Clinton's wrong-doing, as evidenced by this quote: "l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public"
What Clinton did was absolutely wrong, but that was a personal affair.
In life and the law, intentions are foundational for evaluating people's actions.
The scandalizing of Clinton's behavior was only about political slander, mud slinging. Your pearl clutching is performative and partisan.
There's so much to not like about the Dems, and it's primarily in the fact that DNC leadership is corrupt and they are only interested in serving themselves and their patrons. But the party members as a whole do work on trying to do good governance. They often fail, but on the intentions front, it's not disagreable.
Counter this to the modern day GOP -- they've been coopted by the evangelicals and white nationalists, and the only thing they want to govern is demanding that their theology is the law of the land. No thank you.
I have respect for old-school conservatives who cared about limited government -- I totally agree with that concept but differ on how those limits are set.
I have no party affiliation and loath partisan politics, but with the two-party system one has to choose the least worst.
If you do something at work with a subordinate, it’s no longer personal.
Dating in the workplace is usually a bad idea, especially if it's a manager and an underling because the power dynamics get fucked up.
But in the case of the Clinton affair, it was effectively personal (Bill, Monica, Hillary) -- their business.
Please explain how this impacted Clinton's ability to execute his job, or how that dynamic hurt Lewinsky in such a way that it needed to be a national affair?
This is the same kind of feigned moral panic over Hunter Biden's business dealings -- designed solely to smear the president for their opponents political gain.
Edit: as a counter point, Trump fucking a porn star months after his son was born was technically between him, Stormy, and Melania. The reason that it was worthy of public scrutiny was that he committed campaign finance fraud with the hush money. Ironically, no pearls were clutched by his supporters over that.
Clinton damaged the White House intern program by making it look like they were either his harem or victims; having an affair in his office also made it look like he was more interested in using his position to cheat on his wife than do his job. It was at least a distraction, and probably more of a handicap. If he wanted to have sex with Lewinsky, he should have waited until she left the internship, and done it in the Residence.
I purposely avoided comparing Clinton to anyone else, so whatever horrible things Trump has done is just changing the subject. I personally believe that neither of them has committed (anything approximating) the most abhorrent acts by a POTUS, but that's a different conversation.
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This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse".
When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war.
When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system.
When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Reagan also perfected the process of:
1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient. 2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding. 3. Government programs get worse as a result. 4. Goto 1.
He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since.
> We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process
Regular people removed themselves when we chose cultural flashpoints over material wealth.
Even though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point.
> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point
I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.
I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.
More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.
Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.
Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.
Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.
I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.
I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.
The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.
If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.
Don’t blame regular people when billions were spent on lies, disinformation campaigns and rug pulls. We are being systematically manipulated.
I know plenty of good honest people who simply don’t know what’s going on and cannot navigate today’s political landscape
In the attention economy I think there is still plenty of blame to assign to the voters.. they are the ones that care more about culture war topics then the peace and prosperity of their children.
OK sure go blame them. Now what do you have?
The idea that the policially interested should focus on their attention on their priorities and vote for them. Reward politicians with your values.
Also, the federal government should return more political footballs to the local level to stop distracting from their actual jobs
I mean, I also have times where I find myself blaming people for being so stupid.
That said, you have to realize that this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades. Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort and the outcomes are predictable.
> this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades
There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
> Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort
Historically untrue. Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
> There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
Hmm, not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years.
The media influences alone that fuel the sensationalization of these issues are transparent, as are the threads that bind these media groups and those in power over them.
Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example.
> Historically untrue.
What? In what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Almost by definition the successful grassroots movements of the past that have created change were organized, no? I also don't believe there's ever been as effective a media (social and conventional) apparatus in human history as we've had the last half century.
> Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
I mean, this conversation started over the culture war bullshit that seems to have about as good a grip on Americans' attention as ever, although I agree that the material economic conditions are degrading so badly that they are more and more becoming the priority consideration.
That said, channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction.
> not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years
Because for each of these there are a hundred other monied interests, and they're all in covert or open conflict with each other.
> Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example
Yes, that's one group overtly taking over a platform. The fact that they're behaving differently after Weiss should give pause to the hypothesis that this is all already co-ordinated from the shadows.
> what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Every regime fighting survivial deploys all means available to it in its fight. That includes the media. Disorganised groups have overturned concentratios of power far more pronounced than what we have in the U.S. (We have high inequality. But our elite is still usefully fractured.)
> channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction
Here I agree. But there are also powerful immigrant-born Americans and Jewish Americans who obviously don't want to be part of that, and who have influence over money, power and media.
Everyone is trying to consolidate power. But that's an exclusionary imperative. Hence, political competition.
Seems like free speech didn't help Americans avoid becoming economic slaves.
> The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama.
Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.
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This is what you get when you elect a mad king. "I love the inflation" - Donald Trump.
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Not to mention the “largest transfer of wealth” [1] to the ultra rich during covid times.
1: https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1746565358/d11org/oq...
If you look at recent data[1], this has only accelerated further. This was not attributable to one president. Attempting to point blame for complex economic systems to one person is so foolish I don't even know where to start picking it apart. Look at the actual legislation and actions by which this happens. This is done through tariff manipulation, regulatory capture, and insider trading which we literally have weekly evidence of.
[1] https://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-oxfam/fi...
You are leaving out there was a global epidemic happening at the time, it's easier to see the logic of a global crisis which shutdown the global economy creating inflationary pressure from both supply economics, and mitigations taken by governments to keep money circulating (as much as we can disagree if it was the correct measure, it's understandable).
What is understandable about the current causes of inflation?
One president had inflation due to the prior administration building and M2 bomb and a foreign country causing an energy crisis.
The current president the one causing the energy crisis, building another M2 bomb, and raising prices for consumer goods via taxes.
> It's almost as if the choice between the two parties is no choice at all.
Hi, I live in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. You may have heard about what the Republicans in the federal government did here a couple of months ago! The only appropriate response to your sentiment would, rightly, get me banned from this website. Please think before you speak.
For those who just watch fox news we're up to an estimated 700 million dollars of damage, completely aside from the human suffering for no definable reasons. The murders and the justification for murders, the protecting of murderers, and the celebration of convicted murderers in the local MN GOP.
https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2026/06/11/minne... https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/06/02/floyd-family-attorn...
Minneapolis does seem to have a penchant for attracting property damage and economic fallout. Last time it was $500 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arson_damage_during_the_George...
After inflation maybe that one was more expensive!
What relevance does that have to this discussion of the executive branch causing willful damage? It just sounds like you are trying to say that its either false, misleading, or just a place where that happens so why give a shit.
None of those really seem like worthwhile to bring to this discussion.
> Didn't we have even higher inflation under the last president
“The index for final demand goods moved up 2.8 percent in May, the largest increase since data were first calculated in December 2009.”
Granted, that’s a slice of an index. But it promotes a pattern: we’re heading into a place similar to 2022. Then, because of money printing (at the time blamed on supply-chain disruptions). This time, because of money printing amidst an engineered supply-chain disruption.
The takeaway is we’ve had a string of shit-for-brain Presidents since Obama.
Hm, which wars did the last president start? How many war crimes did he happen to do? How many times was he mentioned in the Epstein files?
Yep, no difference detected here, unless you have eyes or a brain.
He allowed allowed the destruction of Gaza to start, and did nothing to stop it even when it was clear what was happening and it was within his power to do so. Of course, Trump would have been no better on that front. But that brings us back to...
The lesser of two evils is still evil
So "there's no difference" becomes "any evil is the same" - that's not how this works.
The lesser of two evils is still lesser.
I dont anyone who doesn’t know that the Biden inflation is a result from COVID money printing.
Until the press and the public do not examine the real long term strategies of the US establishment, this won't change.
All you hear is reporting about Trump's daily contradictory statements, "leaks" in Axios that peace in Iran is imminent, then 40 tomahawk missiles. Next are probably fake peace talks again.
Until the press grasps that the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur. The US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports.
The US population is suffering collateral damage. The billionaires are willing to take that sacrifice.
> the US establishment wants a protracted forever war that hurts the EU, Japan, and India, no change will occur
This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.
> US wants to force investment of these countries in building valuable industrial infrastructure in the US and shake them down with high US energy imports
Americans want lots of things. Current policy isn’t promoting those interests. Currently, the war in Iran is causing long-term demand destruction for the sort of energy products America exports among our allies.
> This presumes way more competence at the top than we’ve got.
That is the intended perception because the public figures are imbeciles. The people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies" has been a priority issue since Reagan blew up a Soviet pipeline to Germany.
Or make the starting point the Suez Crisis when the US unseated Britain in the Middle East and took over.
> people in the background are highly competent and controlling energy flows to US "allies"
What’s your evidence? Because nothing done recently has supported American hegemony, even among our allies. Many of whom yes, are buying a bit more from us energywise, but a lot more from others all while accelerating decarbonisarion.
It’s always nice to think someone is in charge. The truth is modern societies are too complex to control in this cartoonish manner for any meaningful durations. People who convince themselves it is and wind up in power demonstrate the folly of that worldview repeatedly.
Yet, growth mindset.
Not following.
Someone could be in charge one day.
There are no long term strategies, neither the "establishment" nor the public (ie you) seem to grasp that simple fact.
Americans simply do not wish to engage with reality any more, and that's why they're perfectly happy to elect a TV personality for a president who filled his cabinet with TV personalities who can do nothing more than LARP as statesmen.
I think your comment is another instance of this LARP, where the public can't tell the difference between reality and TV.
Can't wait for AI to bring the prices of all goods to near zero :)
This is what worries me about the AI productivity boom vs previous tech/industrial productivity booms..
We've already made most consumer goods cheap.
The goods/services that are more inflation tied - food, transport, medicine, housing, and education.. are those tethered tied to physical world where costs are driven by energy, regulatory issues, and skilled domestic labor.
Unless it brings the price of labour to near zero.
Yes, purchasing power of USD declines with inflation.
No, that doesn't mean over a long enough time horizon what most people think it means.
USD has declined significantly since 2017 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R), but what it buys has substantively changed.
- You couldn't buy continous glucose monitors, OTC hearing aids, home heart monitors using your cellphone or watch or countless medications that didn't exist in 2017 (eg. Journavx, the first non-opiod pain med, smart insulin pens, etc.).
- You couldn't buy noise-cancelling earbuds, generative AI, somewhat affordable electric vehicles, PT and medical advice from Youtube/AI, self driving vehicles, more reliable electricity from grid-scale store, Satellite rescue from your cellphone, etc.
The retort will be daily items are about 30% more expensive since Covid. This is the result of Federal and State policies that have little to do with the White House and everything to do with Congress and State Houses. As just one example... ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?
California has 4 seasons of growing weather, good soil, and conditions that help against rot. The lack of water is exactly why it's good for growing stuff, if you can get the water. Excess water ruins crops all the time.
This comment that seems determined to state its conclusion without providing any evidence other than “why is so much agriculture in parts of the country that are conducive to agriculture”.
It says exactly what it says, which is that energy prices are higher. You can read the report.
> ask yourself why so much ag is grown in Western states with water shortages and so far from the rest of the country?
Because water is one of the cheapest inputs into agriculture. Growing almonds in California is a ~bad idea, but it's not a stupid idea.