I don't think "U.S. Jobs Disappear At Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession"[1] is vibes.
The future picture on inflation also looks bleak[2]:
> Taken individually, lagged tariff pass‑through, tightening labor supply, looser fiscal policy, and accommodative financial conditions would each push inflation modestly higher. Taken together—and interacting with increasingly fragile household inflation expectations—they create a macro environment in which inflation rising above 4 percent by the end of 2026 is not only plausible but arguably the most likely scenario.
It's common knowledge that the spending in the current economy is very K-shaped: the top 10% are the only ones staying above water.
Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
I don't think you can draw any conclusion about the economic health of the entire population from a small number of cherry-picked cases so egregious that a YouTuber deemed entertaining enough to turn them into monetized videos.
I can tell you about the people around me making below median income and still raising families, but it would not be interesting enough for YouTube.
Youtube is entertainment designed to get clicks, and the algorithm enhances biases. Fox news hosts would likely be youtubers if they started their careers today.
A great example of what seems to be the current ethos for the generation (I realize Handey isn't of this generation). Very much "nothing matters as we'll all die anyway, who cares about what comes after". I don't fault the sentiment, to be clear, it's just an indication of the socio-economic situation that fostered it.
Look into Doom spending. Excessive spending is actually a psychological response to hardship for consumers in 1st world countries. It's a documented phenomenon that has happened in the past and is exacerbated by social media, gamification of wealth, and general incompetence (all of which are on the uptrend).
> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
It's a lot easier if you live near either your parents or your in-laws. Having grandparents around to help is the cheat code to making parenting easier. We didn't have that until our oldest was 7 and it was life changing.
But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.
It's a tale as old as life itself. Some organisms succeed in coping with the environment they find themselves in. The genes and culture of these organisms gets passed on to the next generation.
yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.
Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.
> Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
I actually don't think I've ever read anything that made as little contact with reality as this. Its actually impressive. If you actually think this is in any way true, you need to deeply deeply reevaluate the way you perceive the world.
China learned from watching the US use export controls against them, and they've adapted them to their rare earths exports[1]. They're not going to be as easily bamboozled as the US has been with nVidia cards.
My guess: Japan deletes the pacifist promises in its constitution, fully rearms, announces nuclear weapons capability (or does an Israel and ‘refuses to confirm or deny’), and signs a mutual defense pact with Taiwan.
The most effective use of public funds would be to simply buy out the patent and give it out for free. It will save so much in future medical costs it's a no-brainer.
It’s a no brainer for reasonable people, but a very substantial portion of US voters would rather shoot themselves in the foot so long as there was a chance some shrapnel grazed a liberal.
> This is about as Wild West as most of us have lived through for the U.S. drug market.
I don't know about that. I'm old enough to remember The Vaping Panic of 2019, where (medical and/or recreational) cannabis vape liquid was adulterated with Vitamin E acetate in industrial quantities, which caused widespread injury and death. The real cause was called out very quickly (thanks in part to investigative reporting by...WeedMaps[1]), but health departments flailed and spent months blaming it on Juul and teen e-cigarettes. The panic evaporated because right as the public health community realized what was happening, Covid broke out.
To this day, afaik no testing of vapes is required to ensure they don't contain this toxic ingredient.
> To this day, afaik no testing of vapes is required to ensure they don't contain this toxic ingredient.
This is a pretty good example of how "testing requirements" tend to be reactionary and effectively useless.
Vapes contained Vitamin E because the sellers were cutting the product with it, the same way drug dealers cut drugs with starch or sugar or something worse. It wasn't a manufacturing mistake, they were adding it on purpose to rip off the customer. It makes sense for that to be a crime -- it's fraud and negligence -- so the argument comes that we should require testing for it.
But if you add a test for something like that, they either cut it with something else that the test won't show (which might be even worse) or they add the cutting agent to the distribution pipeline somewhere after the point where the testing requirement is imposed. Testing for something works against mistakes, not purposeful behavior.
Meanwhile the people doing it were probably idiots who didn't know it would cause physiological harmful and thought they were just ripping people off, so then the argument comes that we should be testing to make sure they're not doing that. Except there is no generic test for every possible problem, so at the point they first started adding it, the government would have had no reason to test for that in particular, and by the time it becomes generally known that adding that substance is harmful, they'd have stopped adding it because they don't want to be sued or arrested when their customers have those symptoms and then permanently testing everything for something everybody has already independently stopped doing is a waste of resources.
The problem is people want the generic test that could catch every possible problem and that isn't a real thing, and there is no point in doing the specific test for something that has already stopped happening.
I wouldn’t put vapes in the same category as patented pharmaceuticals.
They are already an unhealthy vice for one thing. They do not require a prescription and are sold over the counter to anyone who presents an ID showing they are of age.
Those vapes were also largely made by relatively fly-by-night manufacturers selling into mostly shady retail shops. Additionally there was (still is? Haven’t kept up on it) no real consensus that vitamin E acetate was a dangerous chemical unfit for purpose.
This is the first time in my lifetime that I can recall of major companies blatantly end-arounding the entire pharmaceutical approval process for a prescription drug. Full on advertising their disregard for the rules on public airwaves and everything.
FDA being slow to react to a public health concern due to an adulterated over the counter product imo is not the same category. This is literally telling the FDA and major pharma “come at me bro” and expecting the delay to be profitable enough to offset any future penalties.
Anthony Kiedis isn't headlining an event that's being put on by an expressly christian organization. He also is not closely tied to someone who's mentioned more in the Epstein Files than Harry Potter is mentioned in the Harry Potter books.
Kid Rock has some pretty infamous, explicit lyrics I won’t be pasting here. Just look it up, there are dozens of articles about this right now. It’s not rumors or something ambiguous, he is a disgusting person with some pretty awful things to say. Given TP’s christian mission/focus and constant moral panic stance, coupled with the MAGA movement’s alleged concern for minors, “he is not appropriate” is an understatement.
Unfortunately he stays somewhat relevant because he drapes himself in an American flag.
