Alchemy United

@LynAldenContact I wish we'd stop confusing cost of living increases with inflation (i.e., adding to the money supply).

The Fed has been putting out research reports trying to assess how much goods inflation can be attributed to the tariffs. federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/…

@ChrisMartzWX Term limits will change the faces but it won't change the system. The two party system is still the gatekeeper. Getting a new face w/ the same tired tow-the-party-line ideas isn't going help us. esp when so many elections are effectively uncontested.

The bigger problem here is the lack of term limits. But I’ll take it a step further. Any member of Congress who does not vote to balance the budget becomes ineligible to hold public office ever again.

@NoahRyanCo Yes, noticed that as well. I've been taking that as a proxy for the strength and health of the economy. That is, desperate ppl do shady / desperate things to stop from drowning. If a little dishonesty keeps you out of the red then so be it. It's a canary for sure.

You cannot go anyhwere in the US anymore without feeling taking advantage of. Every restaurant, every lease agreement, every purchase. Everything is so blatantly predatory. Like they don't even care to be subtle about the fact that they're operating in bad faith. And we're all just submissive to it

@cafreiman So it wasn't labor unions? And yet when there's been a drop in labor unions, worker have lost group and more of the spoils of productivity have trickled up, not down. Perhaps these historians don't do more contemporary history. Perhaps one sample from one economy isn't enough?

Historically, it’s been economic growth (which is of course bolstered by technology) rather than the labor movement that’s reduced work hours:

@Real_SF @RockChartrand "Thank you sir, can I have another?"

@RockChartrand Its amazing how many people have been raised to believe any tax is a good tax.

A supermajority may say taxes are too high, but a huge number still want the government to keep doing the very things that make taxes high. It’s easy to complain about taxation in the abstract. The real question is: what spending do you want cut? If your answer is ‘none,’ then you don’t actually oppose high taxes. You just want the bill hidden, delayed, or handed to someone else. And opposing taxes imposed by the other tribe while cheering your own tribe to do the same for your priorities isn’t opposition to taxation, it’s selective taxation. If you keep demanding that government solve the problems it created, you’re not resisting its growth. You’re sanctioning it. Politicians aren’t operating in a vacuum. They respond to incentives, and those incentives come from voters. Different tribes, different demands, but still demands. In the end, you don’t just get bad politicians. You get politicians that reflect what people reward.

@RockChartrand The System at its core could be and should be less skewed. Its foundation should be just-based and fair, etc. It's not. Taxes don't fix a broken system. Taxes only reward the gov for a job poorly done. The fact that so many want to reward gov for doing a shite job is insane.

@MariaDavidson Nah. Not at all. It's too soon to tell. Wait 25, 35, 50 years when TX and FL are more like NJ or NY. The infrastructure is aging, the original excess capacity has been exceeded. Etc. THEN looking at $ per capita. Wait for the pop growth's impact to kick in. It's too soon!

Florida and Texas have the lowest state spending per person in the US. They're also 2 of the 5 states that had the highest population growth in the last decade. State spending ≠ quality of life improving.

@IterIntellectus But this is why using "fertility" and "fertility rate" are misleading. This isn't a medical / biologic issue. Birthrate - a different word with a different meaning - IS the issue. To move the conversation forward, it would help to speak to the proper problem.

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate" my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations. poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

@4lexanderPetrou That's part of it. Part of it is wages not keeping pace. Part of it is building larger homes. Part of it is, home now have so many more amenities (AC, insulation, etc). The issue has plenty of nuance. Oversimplification isn't helping the discussion

The reason you can’t buy a house is because of money printing. Not because of greedy landlords.

@APompliano Why do they use fertility rate when they mean birthrate? Even the Note in the footer confuses the two. Fertility is medical / physical / health condition, it's the ability to give birth and is not a synonym for actually doing so.

The US fertility rate has hit an all-time low. This is going to be disastrous. Do your part and have more babies!

@DrDiGiorgio Most don't want to hear this but AI might be the ideal solution. AI is great at pattern recognition. It can also compile the patterns of 1000s if not millions of cases. Med staff can then be more focused on patients and outcomes.

The widening gap between "licensed" and "actually practicing" is the biggest driver of physician shortages. Doctors are increasingly taking early retirement and/or leaving the field for non-clinical work because the practice of medicine has become so miserable. This goes hand in hand with the death of independent practice. Doctors who are employees have no reason to keep practicing if they have other means of financial independence. Doctors who have built practices and invested in their community, on the other hand, do continue to practice. Restore independent physician practices to fix the doctor "shortage."

@GaltMD @DrDiGiorgio @HeathVeuleman It's not IQ points per se. It's about priorities. The administrators have prioritized profit over patients. Full stop. Visits are treated like a fastfood drive-thru... How long did it take matters more than is the patient healthier? "Served" counts more than outcomes. etc

Theres no other predicted outcome for what happens when you take a bunch of highly intelligent, highly motivated, ambitious people who sacrifice their youths and train for more than a decade to become an expert and then appoint a group of people 30 IQ points their inferior with no expertise at all to be their bosses and tell them how to do a job they themselves haven’t the first idea how to do. I can think of no better recipe for misery and disillusionment.

@DrDiGiorgio But wasn't "consolidation" something intentionally encouraged / created by ACA? When are we going to admit that Obama-care was a nice, feel-good sounding promise, but as implemented, it's a failure for far too many patients and doctors. A fix for the few screwed the many

@Freakonomics #2 has an important caveat... If elected officials actually represented those who elected them, #2 would not be true.

Tax day is nearly here and a lot of what we think we know about taxes … isn’t quite right. In this episode, we break down 10 of the most common tax myths in the U.S., based on research by Jessica Riedl of the Brookings Institution. And look at what the data actually shows. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten…

@glenngabe AI is the new Apple iPod. Websites the new digital music download. That is, music was commoditized and it sold iPods. The artists and labels put in most of the work, but Apple made all the money. Meet the new boss... same as the old boss...

Yep, I wrote a post in October about the insane amount of AI bot crawling and scraping going on -> AI bot traffic surged 300%, hitting publishers hardest: Report Regarding some publishers "tarpitting" to frustrate bots: "Uncontrolled web scraping inflicts heavy technical and financial burdens on publishing infrastructure. Automated bots consume massive server and CDN resources without providing any audience engagement, which spikes operational costs while degrading site performance for real human users. One Akamai customer reclaimed 97% of their request volume by using “tarpitting,” which allows publishers to frustrate these bots." searchengineland.com/ai-bot-traffic… via @MrDannyGoodwin

@agingroy @CellCellPress The problem is simple... there's no profit in prevention. There's no profit in convincing ppl their lifestyle choices do impact their health outcomes. This why we now hear "obesity... it's not your fault" as if someone else picked the food, ate it and say on the sofa

45x. That's how much biological aging from 35 to 65 increases your cancer risk. Smoking? 2.5x. Obesity? 1.6x. This @CellCellPress perspective calls for more cancer prevention, and I'm on board. But the paper attributes 30-45% of cancers to modifiable lifestyle factors while barely mentioning the exponential risk multiplier that is aging itself. SEER data shows cancer incidence jumps ~100-fold over a lifetime. If we're serious about prevention, the biology of aging can't be a footnote.

@WobblyBits_X @4TaxFairness So you have an example of a single economy, and a sample size of 25-ish years? And that's somehow a universal rule? That's funny. Come on, do better.

@AlchemyUnited @4TaxFairness That's what happened through the mid 1900s in the US.

You really have to stop and wonder how the hell everything can be so expensive when all we’ve done for 40+ years is give corporations the tax breaks they swore they needed to hire workers, cut prices, and give everyone raises.

@WobblyBits_X @4TaxFairness You need to substantiate that claim. Historic references (plural) please.

@AlchemyUnited @4TaxFairness Higher taxes make it more attractive for companies to raise wages and benefits because that benefits the company more than just paying more tax on higher profit margins. If your income over a million is taxed at 90% you might as well just put the next million back in.

@robertgraham The USA Fed Gov is $40 TRILLION in debt. The annual interest payment alone is over $1T (read: that $1T doesn't buy taxpayers anything). In short, your overgeneralization fails the smell test. But you knew that, yes? Do better, please.

Socialists shrug their shoulders at such costs. But capitalists do math. They estimate once completed there will be 30 million rides per year between SF and LA. But paying interest on a $126 billion loan is still more expensive than simply providing free airplane rides for those riders. That's why socialist countries are poor, they spend huge amounts of capital on political-but-wasteful projects so there's no capital left to spend on useful stuff, like factories. The California high-speed rail isn't economically viable.

@glenngabe This isn't journalism. She can call it whatever she wants, but journalism it is not.

Focus on news? He produced 600 AI articles "and counting" -> Email: WSJ EIC Emma Tucker praised Fortune's use of AI in its journalism, saying anyone who "thinks it is 'wrong', should get out of journalism fast!" "Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker is impressed by Fortune’s integration of AI into its newsroom. Last month, the Journal reported that Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg had used AI to produce 600 stories and counting, and that AI-written stories now accounted for 20% of the publication’s overall traffic." #f" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">semafor.com/newsletter/04/…