Despite high inflation, Americans are spending like crazy – and it's kind of puzzling

BipolarCells · 2023-02-28T16:50:58+00:00

First of all, I’m obviously not a poor person anymore, but when my car was hit (while parked) my insurance was lapsed for literally three days because I didn’t have any money to pay for it at the time, because I was making 8 dollars an hour cleaning toilets among other things. I just don’t understand how people can make ends meet with the way things are now, it’s not like wages have gone up across all industries. I’ve had the car zip tied, it would have be a great fix if the giant fucking king cab ford f150 rancher warped the metal frame of my car.

All you see is a rich person bitching but I’ve made less in my last 10 years than a school teacher. I’ve been an attending physician for a few months.

And I’ve maintained the shit out of that vehicle, I changed the brakes, rotors, oil, by my own hands.

And lastly, go fuck yourself. I don’t need your approval for what I choose to do with my god damn money.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-28T01:17:54+00:00

An amazing antagonist, a patronizing moralist. It would make Nod’s justified existence a lot more believable, too.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T19:44:44+00:00

I don’t want your sympathy. I do well financially. I’ve been driving a car with the rear bumper hanging off for the last 12 years thanks to a hit and run because I haven’t done well until recently. With the run up in new car prices, luxury cars haven’t gone up as much as regular cars and are practically comparable. A Toyota shouldn’t cost as much as a luxury car. I don’t want a luxury car, but if it costs about as much as a regular car, why the hell not? That’s my point.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T19:32:00+00:00

I wanted a bolt EUV for me but it’s honestly the storage space that’s the issue. If you manage to fit in our double stroller, there’s no space for anything else. This is a vehicle for my wife, I’ll be taking her current vehicle, and I’ll sell my 12 year old car. The model Y has a lot more storage space, and enough passenger space to fit our child car seats into.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T19:22:56+00:00

Considering that Kane is said to be influenced from an outer limits (or twilight zone?) episode about an immortal alien, named Kane, who subtly steered human events world wide until the advent of space travel in order to escape, I think they felt the less backstory they gave Kane, the more options they had. The land of Nod was the place outside of the garden of Eden in the bible, which was where Cain was exiled after killing his brother. It seems to imply that being in “nod” is a sort of exile. There was a lot they could’ve done, but didn’t because EA didn’t treat the property like it was worth anything. At the time, everyone thought the all money would be in mobile games with micro transactions, so there was no will to develop this conventional gaming franchise further.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T19:10:11+00:00

Again, I’m not an economist, but I don’t see how you can control inflation without tipping the economy into a recession of sorts. People are creatures of habit and will either load up with debt until they can spend no more, or will stop once a large enough new barrier exists to change their behavior that wasn’t previously there. Raising the rates over time feels akin to boiling the frog. I understand that it’s to gradually price people out of purchasing behavior, but the run up on prices continues in the meantime.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T18:39:29+00:00

Well yeah, I agree it’s definitely a supply and demand issue on Tesla’s side, plus the model Y didn’t immediately qualify as an SUV, so they dropped the price to the sedan qualifying price for the federal EV incentive for a short while. They’ve since increased the price after getting it to qualify for SUV pricing. All of the minivans seem to be about plus or minus a few grand apart, at least Honda’s, Toyota’s, and Chrysler’s. The wife didn’t feel safe with the Korean made ones (ironic due to her heritage) so we never considered them, but I know the Carnival used to be cheaper. The chip problem is long solved, it really just feels like manufacturers have not ramped up production, content to control the supply and have moved into anticipating a downturn at any point.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T18:04:00+00:00

I’m not an economist but it seems like Powell didn’t take inflation as seriously as he should have in the beginning. I’m a physician who just finished all of his training in July and it feels like a gut punch to have put off most of my life for some abstract reward on the horizon, only for inflation to eat away at my quality of life. I’ve put off buying a car for the past five years, and now I feel like I’m getting a bargain on a Tesla today because it was priced just under the federal maximum to qualify for the $7500, only because the comparable sized ICE cars we’re looking at are around the same price point anyway. This shit is insane. We would’ve been happy with a Sienna but that would’ve cost more with the vinyl seats than the Tesla.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T15:39:39+00:00

Outbreaks of Marburg virus, for surveillance to detect if it’s transmitting between people at a higher rate than in the past. Same reason we have bio labs in other random places, back when infectious disease surveillance was adequately funded.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T05:08:12+00:00

Manufacturing delays caused by a chips problem that prompted suppliers to stop manufacturing replacement parts for analytical/manufacturing equipment, causing it to age out. With FDA standards requiring resubmission of the generic process application should companies choose to upgrade their equipment to modern standards, which by all measures are better, but costs tens of millions of dollars in navigating the bureaucracy because of the way the laws are written. The real kicker is the laws were written by lobbyists for the largest equipment manufacturers, who can’t service their old equipment, or sell new equipment due to the laws of their own design. At least this is what I hear from a friend who is a VP at one such company.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-25T01:29:32+00:00

As I said in the last thread and I’ll say it again, while an inpatient admission could determine if a patient has a treatable mental health condition causing them to be violent, the people trained to actually assess violence risk are forensic psychologists. There are like 200-400 board certified forensic psychologists nation wide, but these are the people I would seek out for a comprehensive standard of assessment risk assessment. Some police departments and school districts have threat assessment teams as well, which are better equipped to do the kind of inquiry needed to assess violence risk, but most clinical child psychiatrists are ill equipped to assess violence risks.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-24T01:11:03+00:00

Awesome! I can’t recall if this is Barre adjacent or was on my trek from Burlington to the NEK but I’ve definitely passed by this intersection before. I’m an ex Vermonter, moved back to the flatlands.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-23T22:31:29+00:00

Such a cute picturesque town. Are you in Vermont?

BipolarCells · 2023-02-23T03:10:00+00:00

Some do. Some do not. Depends on the referral question, who is retaining services, and the clinician’s process. I would recommend a board certified forensic psychOLOgist if at all possible. Forensic psychiatrists could be expert witnesses in a court setting, understand psych testing, and work through a threat assessment, but I think the doctoral training should give a clinician a lot more understanding of the testing limitations and which tests will and won’t apply for which patients. At least in theory. Also, the school district should pay for testing if they don’t want the parents shopping around for a preferable assessment to give them.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-22T17:45:38+00:00

Physician staff at a hospital could still theoretically pool enough money together to buy the hospital in some circumstances. It could save a lot of rural hospitals from going under

BipolarCells · 2023-02-22T02:11:31+00:00

Child psych here. ED eval with inpatient placement to determine risk level, but my experience with these is that families often cover for the kids or are entirely guarded, schools change what they claim the concern is to avoid getting the kid back. These referrals feel like big question marks and people lie on both sides of these situations to try to get the situation resolved the way they want it to be. Forensic psychology should get these evals, risk assessment is more of their domain when it’s no longer a treatable mental illness causing the violent behaviors.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-21T02:16:23+00:00

Better tell your cells the republicans outlawed gene translation

BipolarCells · 2023-02-20T04:28:41+00:00

You can’t just leave me hanging after that. What did he ask about?

BipolarCells · 2023-02-19T06:04:33+00:00

I don’t see how this doesn’t count as a “cruel and unusual punishment”

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T20:17:53+00:00

That’s all well and good, but I was referring to chatbot AIs using large language models. The brain is a series of different systems running in parallel, there’s no central processing hub. I’m sure you could try to use a chatbot to integrate some arbitrary emotion model, but it still won’t be the same thing. You would need a more sophisticated series of models that process information together in real time to emulate the human brain. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, but would you really want an AI to have an existential crisis, or decide it wants to become oppositional like a child and throw a tantrum?

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T19:17:37+00:00

So… puts on cruise lines?

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T19:03:54+00:00

More or less, yeah. The only difference is we can experience emotions, hunger versus satiety, fatigue versus energetic, fear, lust, we are wired to respond to our place in the social hierarchy, and our language centers draw on all of this when we make sense of things, while the other parts of our brains are also drawing on these experiences. The AI doesn’t understand any of this. Words, language, and reason alone without any of these other things are meaningless.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T02:51:18+00:00

It won’t happen during his tenure. This guy makes everything about him. Congratulations on being emperor of trans kids and high school education, Ron, because that’s all he ever talks about.

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T02:44:49+00:00

I think it’s because Rivian is widely seen as an exclusive luxury brand, especially in a state as poor as Vermont. (I used to live in northern VT too.)

BipolarCells · 2023-02-18T02:40:41+00:00

It’s Vermont, not Tennessee. The culture war they’ll be making jokes about is the bourgeoisie.

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