It's truly absurd. People who are actually getting consistent raises are often only getting 2-3% raises. Meanwhile rent is going up 5-20% a year and food prices are up (according to the sources I'm seeing when googling, honestly it feels worse than this to me) like 25% since 2020 which is an average of over 5% increase a year.

With consistent raises my real income is consistently lower every year. I'd like an economist to explain why I should be happy about that.

But they're rising slightly less fast!

Everyone has a part to play in the spectacle.

Yes all economists are stupid and only the hexbears understand economics.

One way of juking the stats is to stop classifying people as "looking for work." So after five years goes by when someone is on disability, the number of people "unemployed" goes down. People who work multiple part-time jobs aren't considered "looking for work," even when they'd prefer or need a full-time job. People working in the gig economy who get unreliable employment also "aren't looking."

Basically, over half the workforce who needs full-time employment, especially for health insurance, only works part-time or not at all. None of them are counted, so unemployment gets calculated as going down.

It's a good example of capitalists not relying on objective data and making shit up, taking action based on the shit they made up, then being surprised when those actions don't fix anything.

Yes. Jobs numbers are completely made up

lol yeah they just had a downward adjustment of like 800k jobs from their last numbers 😂

Boeing even just announced a further 17,000 job cuts. Rumors of another round of cuts of a similar size in January as well

It’s not wrong though. The US bourgeoisie have been trying to engineer a recession for the past two years. That’s why the Feds hiked interest rate - to curb inflation by creating unemployment which will lead into a recession.

But what the central bankers didn’t understand was that the US treasury bond is so huge that raising interest rate simply ended up having the federal government creating a huge deficit (~$1 trillion paid out in interest in 2023 alone) that through the “trickling down” of such a huge mass of money, still managed to keep the economy barely afloat.

If you think about how capitalism actually works, it makes sense: the bourgeoisie want austerity, but since monetary austerity (raising interest rate) is not working as they had anticipated, they’re doing the industrial austerity (laying off workers) themselves.

The end goal is to create unemployment, make people lose their savings, healthcare and becoming more indebted, induce a recession and then rehire them at lower wages. Its function is to discipline labor.

The goal of a recession is also in line with the military industrial complex and the national security state since the US military has been having a lot of trouble recruiting people into the military - a recession and mass employment would generate a surge in military enlistment needed to rectify their current predicament.

It’s always the same shit. You and I just keep losing lol

Shit would get confusing real fast what with all the Mikes running around.

In many cases, it's actually creepier in this side of the world to address strangers by their first name, as if they were some personal acquaintance, some buddy nearby when they're actually some billionaire vampire that doesn't care if their workers live or die as long as he can squeeze money out of them.

Presumably it evolved from the honorific format of of 'Mr./Ms./Mrs. Surname', which itself presumably arose out of the societal and familial norms of inheritances and marriage and even profession ("Schumaker" family making shoes, "Baker" family in kitchen work and baking bread, etc.), which surnames historically served as connections and indicators of, while being less commonly shared between other families as first names. Which I would assume was an evolution from systems of tribal clan names into new material conditions.

It's not only a US thing, and not even only English it's a wider west European thing from their particular historical developments and how languages reflected and were reflected in that. In french you have 'Monsieur/mademoiselle surname' too for instance, or Señor/Señora Surname in Spanish etc. etc. And due to surnames indicating profession/status/inheritance/marriage there are also honorifics that were used in that same format for royal and nobility and clergy titles indicating what noble or royal family. "Father Surname"/"Lord Surname"/"Monsignor Surname"/"Monseigneur Surname" etc.

It's very common in all or almost all indoeuropean languages, as in those there are way more different surnames than first names, so it's harder to confuse people, especially in context.

I think it supposed to be a respect thing for people higher in a social hierarchy? So, people like presidents always get surnamed. I don't think its that common in normal everyday life?