I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. It comes across as very disingenuous to state that how people are feeling aren’t aligned with the facts.
Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.
Americans have noticed how little the overall economy correlates with their lives. That doesn’t mean they are making accurate statements about the economy, but rather that the economy isn’t something that matters to them.
Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit.
On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.
I think it's just a terminology or definition problem then. I think when the average person talks about if the economy is doing good or bad they are mostly thinking about their own wallet and what they can buy etc and how much things cost compared to previously.
If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit.
I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.
I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the coarse, high level statistics provided by the article aren’t in line with what the majority of Americans are experiencing.
For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.
I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.
In my city I could very much believe overall crime is down, but due to recent social events crime is far more spread out. Areas that used to experience very little crime are now seeing far more. Areas that saw crazy levels of crime leveled off some.
Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark.
Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.
NYC crime only really fell in the 90’s, that’s in living memory for a large chunk of the population and there where noticeable improvements up until COVID.
Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.
When you all say “crime down not crime up” you are not saying compared to what. If you want to compare against the worst crime levels in American history, congratulations. But crime has been up in major cities due to the George Floyd effect, that’s just reality. The leftist incredulity does not change reality.
Yes, but this starts to get into semantics. If a person complains about the economy (as in the relative-to-the-past QoL of common citizens), and an economist says the economy is great, they're talking past each other by using the word economy differently (colloquial vs formal).
In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all.
That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.
"Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.
You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it.
Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.
There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out.
“Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.
"economical" is a different word than "economy", and also "affordable" or "thrifty", while a related concept to either the original sense of "economy" in English from the 15th C or the even older Greek root (the two are different) is not either off those simply transformed from a noun to an adjective without other shift of meaning.
By died out I meant the household aspect is gone, the original meaning included things like paying a carpenter to fix your roof which just seems like an alien use of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconomicus Outside any transaction playing a role in the overall economy.
I suspect it shifted with the rise of companies and machinery. So I agree people talk about a ships fuel economy they are referring to efficiency, but the non efficiency aspects of the original definition is absent. Meaning people talking about the economy being good because they got a raise isn’t referring to household budgets but the wider economic system.
If GDP keeps increasing, but the percentage of GDP that flows to labor keeps decreasing, then both of these things are true:
* the economy has grown
* people are worse off
People's feelings about the economy can be both accurate ("we are worse off") and inaccurate ("the economy is worse").
The lesson here is that we need to clear about what the metrics we are using (e.g. GDP or disposable income after housing/health/food/transportation is accounted for) are actually good for.
Rising GDP really does indicate a larger and/or more productive economy. But because of the way wealth is distributed and controlled in the US, a larger and/or more productive economy does not have any direct relationship to individual people's economic situation.
They think Americans are a bunch of cry babies because they think they are poor when it is obvious that even the poorest among them are wealthier than the majority of the people outside America.
The simpler explanation is that the (well documented) right wing propaganda outlets in the US convinced people that the economy was bad.
The poll asked people for their personal experiences at the micro level, and the respondents said things were great. The macro statistics were also great.
The only negative was people’s perception of the economy.
Peoples financial situation has increased overall, just like mine has. Even though it’s increased and I’m content with the increase I also see that there is less opportunity than there was a few years ago.
> Peoples financial situation has increased overall,
Some people's. Since 2020 our housing doubled. So did our auto insurance. We're housed because my children became adults and added 3 incomes to the household.
With 4 typical incomes we make basic bills + afford knock-on expenses like repair and medical bills. We also make just enough money to pay less for many expenses.
Something that changed all over: Couples generally can't afford living expenses on 2 typical wages.
If you're earning 6-figure salaries in tech, of course everything seems OK, even if food prices double and the cost of housing gets further out of control.
A lot of people had a very different experience when the post-covid inflation hit hard.
This is hard to take seriously. As someone else pointed, perhaps the leftist propaganda has convinced you of something false and not the other way round as you. You should talk to some real or go to grocery store, this is just denying basic reality. Even many leftists don’t deny the economic reality, they just like to blame the virus; I mean, which one is it?
The sad part is that that name doesn't feel like that much of a stretch for Microsoft. I wouldn't put it past them to end up with two products called Copilot.
My company is flying over architects / project members for design meetings from other countries for small meetings over the course of of a week. Does this usually require a work visa ?
I wonder if there could be an option to share the generated ai subtitiles so there is no duplicate effort. For example Movie_torrent.vlc subs can be shared on some other users machine with the same Movie_torrent.vlc file.
Obv you can find majority of subs online for popular files but niche cases usually have low subs available and sharing AI could help the ecosystem.
Given modern mirrorless cameras can detect and track humans or mammals using DSPs and NNs without any discernible battery penalty at 30/60/120/240FPS (depending on camera class), I think they can do it with very small and efficient models with some frequency clamping and downsampling.
Initial versions will be more power hungry, but it'll be negligible at the end, given that modern processors have accelerators for image and voice based AI applications.
I just use chat gpt. I use it in all manners — questions about the business domain I am in, front end and backend coding questions, as well as istio configurations.
I am well versed in all three areas, but obviously I can’t remember all the syntax, and don’t have time to trial and error the changes, and ai reduces that loop. I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code, I use it mostly to demonstrate the principle of what I am trying to achieve.
I have many specific examples of massive time save.
Yes, that's about how I've used it. I found that it is good at snippets, mid-complexity queries, etc., but not so much full applications.
Still, I keep hearing people claim that devs are getting ~60% productivity increases. And, I'm trying to figure out if this is supposedly through tools like Copilot. Also wondering whether AI has really had a significant impact on no code and low code tools.
Just trying to see through the hype at what devs are really getting out of AI in its current state.
The three pointer isn’t the problem. I actually prefer the three point shooting. It also seems like it encourages athleticism over raw size.
The real problem, in my opinion, is the lack of aggression. It’s what made sports more interesting to watch in the 80s and 90s. It’s been toned down to the point where it’s not interesting.
My first impression to your last paragraph was disappoint that we are using this sort of tech to solve this problem.
When I thought a little more, I realized it may not be a bad thing. This will solve an actual problem for real people in an area where many potential solutions have failed.
I do understand it seems weird today, but it may be a good thing.
Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.