While I am sympathetic to the “vibes don’t match data” narrative that’s not why Biden is losing. The way people consume information has changed drastically in the last 20 years in a way that’s massively advantageous for right wing shitheads.
Obviously legacy media is dead, local TV is right wing nonsense, newspapers are dead, the elite Exeter douchebags that populate what remains of journalism spend their time being mad someone laughed at them for berating a service worker, etc.
But what’s really changed is the ability of bad faith billionaires to force their horseshit into everyone’s life. 20 years ago you had to go find Borodog to hear about AC fantasy land. You had to get to some dark corners of the internet you sought out to see nazi shit. Now people can buy their way into shoving that shit in front of impressionable young people. And there’s no counter to it because there is no money in fighting back against bullshit. The fact there IS money in the most toxic idiotic ideology is just a bonus for the billionaires.
From what I’m seeing the right wing bullshit isn’t working very well on people under 50 vs people over 50. The reality is the olds have been slowly stewed in a combination of better experiences as a group than the younger cohort and right wing propaganda for their entire lives at this point. Rush was on AM radio widely available for several hours a day for decades.
The problem the right is having now is that they won and things objectively got worse. My personal theory of social movements is that they are started by some legitimate grievance/reform that a lot of reasonable people want, achieve that goal, and then flail around looking for a reason to go on existing because people have careers to think of. Usually that involves doubling down and trying to get an enhanced version of the thing everyone originally wanted. Repeat that five times and all that’s left is the stuff the really crazy people wanted.
That’s where the right is in 2024. Project 2025 is so singularly insane it would be funny if they weren’t absolutely going to do it if they win which very much could happen.
There comes a point where with each victory you lose a meaningful number of people because the shit you’re advocating for is not popular.
And owned by individuals. Bloomberg is the best business news and it’s owned by Mike Bloomberg. The Washington Post belongs to Jeff Bezos and that’s the most credible news about Washington. The New York Times is owned and written for the Richy Rich family’s personal tastes. ‘Journalism’ was an easy target for Trump because the East Palestine, OH disaster news got to me through the real world 3 days after it happened before they reported it. They aren’t in any danger of doing the job people need them to do, which is be lookouts so the rest of us can go about our business without worrying about getting blindsided by a train derailment.
I’m actually pretty annoyed about that train derailment, it happened <100 miles from a major customer of mine and it actually fucked up my week a good bit. I should have had the weekend to deal with those problems so everything could run smoothly on Monday morning instead of having to put out fires the whole week. Absolutely huge failure in the core function of what news is supposed to be selling me.
We should just have a publicly funded news service that reports the facts of the day. What NPR would be if it was actually fully funded instead of having to whore itself out to stay on the air.
This has 100% been my anecdotal experience. Like I have straight up floridly psychotic folks holding down 15/hr jobs to supplement their disability income who would be completely unemployable in other economic environments. But the teachers now feel like they are almost homeless.
I vaguely remember that you said you would turn down that a guaranteed 10 million because you thought you could make more. I have forgotten all of the details and the time frame involved. Would you still answer the same way?
It could be that I’m misremembering it completely, in which case please disregard.
If I recall correctly, it was $10M to never play another hand of poker. I would absolutely take it now, it would suck in a way because it’s a major goal of mine to win bracelets, but yeah we need money.
Setting the bracelet thing aside, I think you said the reason you would turn it down is that you were confident that you would earn more over your poker career than the net present value of getting 10 million today. Do you no longer feel that is likely?
I don’t think I said that, I think I said I expected to get to a net worth of $10M (or maybe to my “number” which is lower) eventually and I wouldn’t trade chasing bracelets forever to speed it up.
I still expect to get to my number eventually, but I expect it to take longer both time wise and hours worked wise - like a lot of 70 hour weeks. But I don’t know, a lot depends on what happens with the housing market the next few years.
Wait a second. So you would have turned down an amount of money greater than all the money you think you are going to ever need for your entire life because it would have prevented you from winning bracelets? That seems like a really weird choice to make.
