• 2 Posts
  • 551 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 6th, 2023

help-circle



  • In addition to this, poverty levels were set like 80 years ago based on the cost of food alone. They took an “average” grocery order, made up, and used a set percentage to extrapolate out. So say the recommendation is 30% of your income on food and then average spend was $100 ->100/0.3= $333.

    So while the levels haven’t been updated in a long time, simultaneously we’ve added whole sectors of the economy that weren’t envisioned when this calculation was performed. Transportation and education are huge expenses that used to be much cheaper or nearly free. Add to that the fact that housing, transportation, education, and medical costs have skyrocketed above average inflation, and the poverty numbers are worse than meaningless.













  • There’s a great book called The Dictator’s handbook that explains why the Russian oligarchs couldn’t give less of a damn. There’s a YouTube video called Rules for Rulers that does a good recap of it, and the overall political theory behind all of it is Selectorate theory.

    The long and the short is that as long as resources are available to the elite, and as long as they have enough to keep their underlings satisfied, the only time you have real unrest is when the dissatisfication from the bottom outweighs the resource allocation from the top.

    Which they’ve done a good job of preventing by keeping the populous off balance and unable to organize.





  • The take is actually grounded in history.

    The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.

    And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.

    We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.

    There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.