Roien Rahimi came to the U.S. from Afghanistan almost three years ago and now works for an organization that supports refugees’ mental health. He, too, is still struggling, he said. “I have to work even during the weekend, so I can afford the expenses.”
This makes it difficult to pay attention to the political climate of his new home. “Afghan new immigrants, they’re struggling with their life right now. It’s a bit far to think about the election,” he said. He said he doesn’t follow politics much, but spoke favorably of Donald Trump, and mentioned concerns over Joe Biden’s age. “If they bring good life to people of the US, we are happy. That’s what matters,” Rahimi concluded.
People who aren't paying attention have an uninformed opinion. Let's write an entire article about it.
Didn't Trump initiate the pull out, and left Biden to pick up the crap?
UK here, Afghans that helped us should automatically get the right to live here. We have left some of these people to their fate at the hands of the Taliban. Whatever government ministers signed off on that ought to be swapped for the Afghans they left behind.
The full quote is even more biting... And accurate, sadly:
An American veteran who has been training Ukrainian soldiers in combat said he’s disgusted with the Republican Party, which he says is either “totally compromised by Russia and is willfully aiding Russian interests” or is chock-full of “sycophantic cowards who would gladly watch Ukrainians get killed if it meant Trump had a higher chance of winning reelection.”
To be honest, we should be pushing for peace there too. Ukraine is taking hits that they won't recover from and it is quickly turning into a much bigger global conflict. We need less war and less war machines in the world, not more.
How do you want us to push for peace there too? Because we have been since the beginning of the war in my eyes.
What do you mean by "won't recover from"? Because they have lost things that can't be recovered since the beginning of the war. Russia is losing things they can't recover too; thousands of its people for example, it's money reserves, its military inventory, its non-military-sector economy. Where do you draw the line for Russia and Ukraine of what is "won't recover from"? Western nations have already committed to helping rebuild the country and especially its destroyed infrastructure.
How is the war in Ukraine "quickly turning into a much bigger global conflict"? Fighting is still only within Ukraine and the border to Russia. Western material support has been the case since the beginning.
I have to assume by pushing for peace you mean Ukraine should accept losing large parts of its territory and human atrocities in order for the fighting to end. Is letting Russia win going to reduce conflict long term though? They'll have more resources to invade other countries next. And proof that it's a worth investment. That works and they win from. There was precedent before the current war in Ukraine, which is why they started this invasion in the first place. Only this time it didn't go as smoothly.
Throwing gasoline at a fire is not going to put it out.
The US and NATO recently authorized Ukraine to use Nato controlled weapons offensively. That is a global escalation that involves Nato member states for coordination. If you don't think the escalation is growing then you aren't actually paying attention.
There has been peace talks but there has been western pressure to decline the deals. The US doesn't give a shit about what happens to Ukraine. Come on, they don't even care about us (americans), their own citizens. Ukraine has been proxy to the US for a while and the US will use whatever proxy they have to do battle with Russia no matter the collateral damage.
There is a lot of propaganda on both sides of this conflict but everyone on lemmy and reddit gobble up the western propaganda without a doubt. Let's put away the military boners and try for some actual fucking diplomacy.
Jfc, can't we just fire all of these demon encrusted maggot sacks already? The military industrial complex is a cancer on the world and basically all of our politicians are corrupt pieces of shit.
The military industrial complex is currently also doing what it's supposed to be doing by helping defend Ukraine and thereby Europe. There are two sides to this coin. One could also argue that it makes a lot of sense for the United States to help defend the only democracy in the Middle East, not just for strategic reasons.
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Two key congressional Democrats have given their approval to allow the Biden administration to proceed with what is believed to be the biggest weapons package for Israel, expected to be worth more than $18 billion and include some 50 F-15 fighter jets.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had delayed signing off, telling CNN in April that he was still looking for “assurances” from the Biden administration over the types of weapons before giving his approval to the sale.
“I continue to support the administration’s pause on certain munitions transfers due to concerns about ongoing civilian casualties in Gaza.”
Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave the green light after the sale went through the review process, a spokesman said.
“Any issues or concerns Chair Cardin had were addressed through our ongoing consultations with the Administration, and that’s why he felt it appropriate to allow this case to move forward,” committee communications director Eric Harris said.
While Israel has steadily increased its operations in Rafah, further displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the administration has argued those activities didn’t cross the line.
You're supposed to be a little more subtle than an endless flood of "here's why Russia is powerful, and absolutely definitely winning the war in Ukraine" and then "here's why Trump is awesome and the Democrats are bad."
A heavy helping of "here's why I am definitely from Texas, look, Texas Texas Texas" is not sufficient to disguise it, I don't think.
We know by now that the economy doing well won't translate into helping us. And any minor benefits we do see will then be hoovered up by landlords, businesses that gatekeep essential goods, and legally-required expenditures like insurance, before we even have any chance to decide for ourselves how to allocate it.
"Hey, SF raised minimum wages by 2.50? Great! That means I can bump the rent on my non rent-controlled properties by a couple hundred bucks next lease! Thanks, SF!"
No matter how you slice it, there's a gap between how the economy is doing and how Americans feel about it.
Why do they keep insisting that we are the ones that are wrong? The economy isn't their numbers. The economy is a real thing, proper operation of which ensures well fed people.
The purpose of an economy is to fond optimal distribution of resources for people. Ultimately it's people that need all the things, right? Either things are materials to produce things for people, or products useful to help other products reach people.
If the people think that's not working, it isn't working. They're not just parroting what they see on the news, they're living day by day, minute by minute in this environment. They see what day to day life costs for them. They're wrong but the eggheads tracking the over fitted model are right? When a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a good measure, that's where the disconnect is. If you want to fix the economy then quit pretending your metrics are more important than people's standard of living.
I think it is more writing to people for whom that is the case.
The economy is shifting to a set of haves and have-nots. The problems that the haves deal with are tied a lot more to economic performance than have-nots.
You also have a case where unemployment is still low, with a lot of the issue being tied to low minimum wages. Usually, the problems that have-nots have with the economy have been tied to unemployment. You can get a job in this economy, it just won't be well paying.
The GDP is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people. The difference between perception of economic barometers like this one is that people used to have more faith in capitalism and it has become so painfully clear that this faith is unwarranted. In the past, people in desperate financial situations could easily delude themselves that they were temporarily embarassed while everyone else in the same situation was probably just lazy. Now people are starting to realize the system is causing it and are much less willing to eat the table scraps thrown to them during times of "economic prosperity."
The measures they use to say the economy is 'good' have one thing in common: they fail to account for value whatsoever.
They account for value in dollars, that's true. But they fail to account for value in any sense that matters: the usefulness of a product or service on the one hand and the labor that produces it on the other. Instead, we look at wages, employment rates, profits, and prices. Those are admittedly easy to quantify and play around with, but they aren't really anchored to anything meaningful.
For example, let's say your company makes on-the-go smoothies, sold in grocery stores and convenience stores. You've got a quality product: a relatively thick smoothy with quality ingredients and a good variety of purees and juices. You product isn't cheap, but that's because you use quality ingredients, pay your employees a fair wage, and use reasonable labor practices in your bottling plant. As a result, people love your product and enjoy working for your company. Soon you come to take up a prominent position on shelves, because your regular customers will reliably buy up your stock.
Now let's say you do an IPO. Once the board members have sway, they want to iron out some of these 'inefficiencies' in your company to increase their profits. First, they come for the ingredients. You wind up with fewer purees in smaller proportions, a greater proportion of inexpensive juices, and the most expensive ingredients dropping off the list entirely. Your loyal customers are annoyed that their smoothies aren't as thick, but it's still better than the other options, so they keep coming.
At your bottling plant, wages start to stagnate. Benefits aren't eliminated, but a new management technique is introduced in which hours are spread out to make it difficult to meet the minimum to qualify. Shifts begin increasingly running on skeleton crews as hours are spread thinner. Of course, the same amount of work still needs to be done, so the employees are doing two to three times as much work as they used to.
Long-term employees who once made the company what it was start to see the change and look for other options before things get worse, leading to a fresh generation of new employees with no clue how much better the company used to be.
At the end your profits are up, employment is up, and you're selling just as much or nearly as much of your product as you were before. If you only look at the numbers, it seems like this whole endeavor was a fantastic win for your company.
Except you've just made the world a little worse. The market presence you earned with your high-quality product no longer has an equivalent product taking it up, degrading the real value of the market itself. Employees are running themselves ragged making a perhaps flat or slightly rising wage per hour, but a wage that's actively diminishing in terms of the labor required to earn it and the purchasing power it comes with.
Now what happens when you take this model and project it to the entire economy?
All the numbers say record profits, low unemployment, stocked shelves full of high-demand products. And yet the reality is that we have to work more to pay for less of shittier and shittier products. Even the people who win don't really win, because they make a worse world for themselves where they can't get a good smoothy.
The whole thing is a mirage that we've been killing our society chasing.
Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.
In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we've seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80's, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.
Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it's unquestionably a lower quality product they've displaced.
Across the beverage industry as a whole, you've got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.
So that's a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.
We're angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn't feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.
The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.
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