3303

Sorry, Craig, but unless you can put it in a peer-reviewed study, your life experience is w o r t h l e s s

3304

Professor Farnsworth voice

Good news! Peer reviewed studies of the economic situation of our generation exist that show we are in a worse spot.

Bad news! Peer reviewed studies of the economic situation of our generation exist that show we are in a worse spot!

3305

So, this is probably a throwaway bit of snark, but still…

  1. The experience – especially share experiences – of people here are important. They’re never worthless. And if you somehow gathered that from anything I posted, I guess I did a poor job communicating.

  2. But with that said, shared experiences need a lot more than demographically homogenous posts from people in a single silo to be considered anything but anecdotal unfortunately.

If you’re unable to distinguish between anecdote and data, Bradley, I don’t think we have too much of value to offer one another in this thread to be honest.

3306

Look I’m all about data and analytical thought.

But let’s not pretend that most of what was expressed was any more rigorously applied than @Alstein ’s initial post. Like, hey, Bruce Springsteen may be a fun retort, but serious data it is not.

As for political perceptions? Eh I’m not going to opine on that. My entire position is based on the measurable economic one, which does, in fact, support the notion that young people today are right to feel worse about their prospects.

How that translates into policy and political alignment? That’s a horse of a different color.

3307

As a representative of Gen X I just wanted to say:

Meh.

3308

That’s not what we’re talking about here, though, is it?

Here’s the thing that I initially reacted to, for reference, was this piece of unsupported, but authoritatively offered “fact”:

It isn’t necessarily what an economic projection says “Will happen”. It’s what people perceive their current economic situation and outlook is at present.

One of the things Ronald Reagan ran on (Perlstein, Reaganland) was a campaign of telling Americans (especially suburban white, middle-class and upper middle-class Americans) that their outlook on life was as low as it had been since the Great Depression. That the promise of the post-war era had been lost in the cultural morass of immorality in the late 1960s and the terrible economic decisions of the 1970s.

And every public opinion poll and every election exit poll pointed to the outlook of 1980s voters of all stripes – but especially voters under 30 – as being as bad as the outlook of voters of the same age in 1968. Which…yikes.

I’m not saying that young voters of 2020 don’t see things as being better. But they don’t see their outlook on the future any worse, either.

3309

Same.

And honestly?

Same. :)

3310

I realize the difference, but I also think we need to understand where we have limitations in available data. And in those cases, we can’t just throw up our hands and say, “Well, the data doesn’t tell a quantitative story, so I guess we can’t learn anything meaningful.” So we turn to the qualitative - anecdotes, shared experiences, and the like. It’s fuzzier, sure, and I probably wouldn’t try to pass laws based on it, but I wouldn’t call it unhelpful, either.

I mean, I’m dumb, sure, but it would get tiring if I had to disclaim all my posts with “This is the opinion of a dummy on the internet, please don’t take what I say as actionable advice or well-researched political intelligence, please know that I’m open to having my mind changed based on the best available hard and soft data.”

I can’t resist the occasional shitpost, but I’m here in good faith! 😁

3311

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU6IndADEWI

3312

pxBS4f

3313

“The 80s were totally worse economically than the 00s and 10s for young people” is certainly a take.

3314

I worked for a small company called Anasazi, starting in ‘89 and running through ‘94. We built a hotel reservation system written in C on a Unix platform / Informix database for Choice Hotels; then parlayed that platform into similar / related efforts for a bunch of others. The effort was specifically triggered by the desire of major hotel companies to get off of IBM mainframe / TPF-based systems that were increasingly hard to staff with qualified developers. Those systems had mostly been built in the 60s and early 70s and the technical people were all approaching retirement.

Personally, I wrote the first working application on that platform as a prototype for people to follow, then joined another team as the lead to deliver a system to Canadian Pacific, then managed the project to build and deliver another to EuroDisney in Paris, then did the same for Forte hotels in the US and UK. Then I used that experience to leap to a management position at one of our other customers.

3315

Sure, fair enough.

3316

Can confirm, literally have the t-shirt.

3317

Mitch has given the marching orders. (I think Biden has responded with ‘take it or leave it’ but I can’t find that reference now.)

Didn’t know what Josh Marshall is referring to until I read this:

The pressing question here is why the Associated Press has insisted on keeping its reporters locked in sensory deprivation chambers for all of June. Linkage, as discussed above, has been an explicit condition for Democrats for a couple weeks and stated constantly and publicly. What’s more, linkage has nothing to do with Republicans. Lindsey Graham squealed, “no deal by extortion.” But Democrats aren’t asking for any Republican votes. So how is Lindsey being extorted? Linkage is all about Democrats participation in a reconciliation package. So who’s being extorted?

3318

So much for ten GOP votes on this thing, then?

Quelle surprise! Ce n’est pas possible!

3319

I think there will be 20+. Because of reconciliation, Biden is going to get most of what he wants. The only question for moderate Republican is can they campaign on helping to pass what will be a very popular bill. The purely blue state folks,I suppose can lambast the whole deal to fend off primary challenges.

3320

This was the end goal though, right? Biden and the rest of the moderates can now claim they tried there best, but the GOP won’t move, so now they will just do it on their own and just get all the bells and whistles.

3321

You think McConnell is going to let not 10, but 20 of his people vote for the compromise bill announced yesterday when the President and the Dem leadership have made it clear that it won’t go anywhere without another bill that only needs 50+ VP Harris to pass the Senate?

Is the idea there to let those people cast a performative yes vote to show that they’re for infrastructure with the certainty that the other bill will never get 50 votes (thus still denying Biden any kind of “win”)?

@legowarrior IF Manchin and Sinema (and others who are biding their time) are ready to vote yes on the Dems-only bill.

3322

The GOP is screwed. Biden was smart enough to go on TV immediately after and say, “we have a deal” with a bunch of GOP members behind him.

Backing out now will be covered as the GOP reneging on a deal, and will give the democrats cover to do a ton of reconciliation stuff.

I will say, however, that democrats who were demanding a simultaneously passed reconciliation bill were dumb. Sometimes you gotta play it cool.