Capitalism
GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
21–30 of 116 posts
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#22[deleted]
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago. Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”
I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.
Yeah, that wrong makes this wrong right.
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#24Capitalism
Still better than the alternatives
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#25CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.
It is immensely frustrating to me that to this day, after a solid century of advances in sciences and mathematical literacy, we are still implicitly stuck in the mental model of averages. Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner. Yes, there ar…
I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.
At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#26“The GoFundMe CEO hopes younger donors, who are often more values-driven, digitally native, and community-oriented, will push giving higher and faster.” I can’t believe it. THIS is what he hopes for ? He is not stating he hopes his country can get out of this mess? Or researching what his company can do? He’s just looking after his cut.
What have you done yourself here about it? For myself, nothing.
Vote?
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#27There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people. We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mod…
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#28There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people. We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mod…
It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#29[dead]
Re: GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong. It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.
Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower. Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately. But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The eff…
Over the last 30 years the most inflated spending category is education and healthcare, which are arguably the least import dependent.