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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I agree with most of that but not all. People don’t notice single digit, but it’s still meaningful when you’re talking real wage growth. Wages grew faster than inflation, even if only by single-digit. The reality was overruled by the fact that post COVID inflation had raised prices. The Democrat plan was to maintain positive, compounding real wage growth.

    Biden identified falling industrial output and employment and enacted subsidies via CHIPS etc al which resulted in real shovels in real dirt building semiconductor plants in upstate NY, new construction of wind and solar plants, etc. Biden identified high pharmaceutical prices and enacted the first ever group negotiated purchasing rates for 10 drugs with more on the way for his 2nd term. Anticompetitive practices, Lina Khan. Crimes against the state, Jack Smith. Historically low violent crime rates, a successful opioid addiction policy seeing massively falling OD rates…

    He and Kamala had two practical failures in Merrick Garland and Palestinian policy. The rest was an optical nightmare, and I’m not sure where the failure was but I’m not sure it was with “the donors”. Kamala spent a shitload more money than Trump and somehow all anyone ever heard was “Killer Kamala” and “but she laughs weird”. Whatever caused that, I think is the ultimate failure of the party.


  • I’m not going to say Biden was perfect, but many of the “investments” Trump is using as proof of victory came as a direct result of Biden policies like the inflation reduction act, chips act, etc. He inherited inflation directly as a result of Trump abandoning “project lightspeed” and choosing to let COVID run wild, which triggered free money which triggered severe inflation, which is why people were pissed off. By 2024, prices were still elevated but inflation itself was under control. Kamala ran on “we beat inflation, and its all uphill from here” (they did, and their policies are continuing to benefit Americans), and Trump ran on “I’ll reduce prices to what they were pre-COVID” (deflation is usually bad). Lina Khan was actually pursuing antitrust suits for the first time in this millennium, and the department of labor was generally siding with unions. I think the reality is that Democratic party PR is absolute shit. The main pressure of inflation was under control late in Biden admin, and Trump sold the voterbase a myth with directly lower prices.

    I get what you’re saying about people being desperate, but the reality is that real wage growth was higher under Biden than Trump 1 and they chose Trump 2 anyways.


  • Perhaps it’s both? Democrats certainly failed to get fence sitters to vote, but lots of people actively chose (and are still choosing) Trump. Look at the young male Black and Latino demographics. They didn’t just sit out a Democrat vote, they actively chose Trump. The Dems may be reasonably accused of failing to activate the leftist voters who sat it out/voted third party, but Trump is STILL sitting at 35%+ approval. Americans DID choose Trump. Trump is a symptom of the disease, not the cause. They love ICE abducting people. They love tariffs. They love him attempting to bully Canada, Mexico and Europe.

    It’s easy to lose sight of this on Lemmy which is pretty far left of the current Overton window, but enough normies actively support what’s going on. It may be a minority of Americans, but between MAGA core and undecideds, it’s very foolish to say America did not choose Trump actively. The leftist no vote/undecided demographic the Dems lost was far smaller than the MAGA and MAGA curious.





  • I mean, a weaker currency really does boost your export value. That’s why Canadian farmers tend to consider the weaker CAD a benefit - they get paid more CAD per yuan when exporting soy or canola for example.

    The issue is that the US intentionally positioned itself with a strong dollar so they can import stuff cheaper. The deal for American “exorbitant privilege” was essentially “hey America, you can have the world as your shopping mall with a strong currency for cheap imported goods, but in exchange you’ll provide the backing for collective defense with your extra budget, stay stable, and buy our goods”. Trump wants to have his cake and eat it too, maintaining the effective global tax via USD transactions but also have a weaker dollar for American exporters. This is all that hubbub about “reducing trade deficits”… which were created intentionally as part of that deal in the Bretton Woods/post-Bretton Woods Era.

    US consumers like cheap phones, TVs, imported fruits, and travel. The strong dollar is a necessity for this. Much of the US debt is heavily subsidized as a side effect of a strong dollar as part of that exorbitant privilege exchange. They can have their weaker dollar but they’ll lose the benefits from it and I don’t think they’ll accept that easily. Throwing all that away to strengthen your export market is deeply foolish, but the mechanisms at play do work generally as they claim.








  • I’ve been selfhosting Synapse on Docker Compose for… maybe 1.5 years now? I’m also running bridges. I’ve never had to do monthly maintenance. I have around 20 users (my friends) active daily, a few federated rooms. I have message retention on and it “just worked” for me (not sure why OP had to do extra config)

    I only find two of the critiques to be true in my experience:

    1. Onboarding can be confusing for non-technical users. I use SSO so no registration, but the average person doesn’t know what an encryption key is, and they probably don’t want to either.
    2. Synapse is written in python and as such isn’t super kind to memory/cpu. I’m doing fine on my cheap Hetzner box though.

    Overall synpase for me has been very much “set it and forget it”. I can’t remember when I last did server maintenance.




  • claude performs acceptably at repetitive tasks when I have an existing pattern for it to follow. “Replicate PR 123, but to add support for object Bar instead of Foo”. If I get some of this busy work in my queue I typically just have claude do it while I’m in a meeting.

    I’d never let it do refactors or design work, but as a code generation tool that can use existing code as a template, it’s useful. I wouldn’t pay an arm and a leg for it, but burning $2 while I’m in a meeting to kill chore tasks is worth it to me.