The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
Hey don’t worry though, that average joe’s poorness has nothing to do with all the money printed in the last few years.
That’s only one relatively minor factor among many. Anyone who points to it without also mentioning the much more significant impacts of things like global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine is either ignorant, or is trying to spin a particular narrative while being intellectually dishonest about their priors.
What priors? Prior criminal offenses? I don’t know what you’re saying I’m being intellectually dishonest about?
Yeah the supply chain disruptions have been horrible too. The war in Ukraine is a predictable effect of economic collapse so it’s kind of part of that same mix, but it also accelerates the decline in economic stability.
Both arms of the lockdown fucked up poor people: the actual stopping of the economy as if it were a machine that could just be re-started again was ridiculously stupid, and the solution of printing money to make up for the stopped economy was double stupid. As a result, poor people are much poorer due to inflation. They claim it’s some single digit inflation, but everybody knows the things they buy have doubled in price.
So we basically cut everyone’s income in half. Oh, except for people who own large amounts of productive capital. Those people’s incomes get to come back up as total activity increases again. Plus, the newly printed money was dumped into stocks, so stockholders got a little offset.
But people who don’t have a lot of wealth, who are living paycheck to paycheck, got fucked by the lockdowns. Deeply, horribly fucked.
And maybe that pain is transmitted pain from covid, maybe we avoided a bunch of covid deaths so the overall suffering is lower than it would have been. But I think people underestimate the suffering that can come from all the lower class people on Earth getting poorer than they were before.
And I think that people’s insistence that it’s the rich who primarily get hurt when the economy falters, is abhorrent.