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Comment by TechnicalVault | Hacker News Reader

People confuse a economic recession with what is happening because of how words sometimes change their meaning away from their technical to a more colloquial interpretation. The economy as a whole is doing well, but people aren't because of inflation. Recession is just the word they've learnt to interpret as "I'm feeling poorer".

And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".

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Imho, inflation has a lot less to do with the perception than bimodal income separation.

Either you're "fine" or you're very much not fine.

Which is why you get people talking past each other.

Nah, inflation sucks across the board. The human mind and human society don’t really react well to things changing so fast. And since losses weigh higher than gains, and everything needs to be renegotiated, nobody feels good about the outcome even if they come up even. This holds for people at the top and people at the bottom.

I'm not sure how much the high end of households whose assets have appreciated with inflation are feeling the suck. I think there are a fair number of households at the top that are feeling better off as reflected in their spending increases in spending in sectors such as travel which can be attributed to a wealth effect[1], as older and wealthier households see their assets increase in value and their confidence increase.

Increases in asset prices spurn consumer spending in wealthier households relative to their proportion of assets owned - the top 10% of households own 62% of the assets.[2]

[1]https://apnews.com/article/inflation-economy-wealth-rates-fe...

[2]https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

You’re talking past the point I made. Losses weigh heavier than gains in human psychology. This is a pretty robust finding. Inflation necessarily means losses for everyone. These can be offset but people don’t necessarily come away feeling good about it. You can say that on average people are better off after the reshuffle (though not necessarily everyone), but even if wages are universally up people will not necessarily feel good about it.

> Inflation necessarily means losses for everyone.

This is the thing you're disagreeing with parent on, because it's not true if you can afford to hold the assets that are inflating.

Inflation doesn't happen in a vacuum: it's inflation-in-terms-of-____.

If you happen to own a lot of ____, because you have disposable income and can afford to invest, then your net worth "inflates" too.

Simple example: how does inflation of the price of gasoline at the pump impact you, if you own a refinery and a filling station? Certainly not in the same way it does to someone who owns neither and commutes to work daily in an ICE vehicle.

Wages have outpaced inflation for like a year now, it's really not a huge deal anymore.

>And the stripper index is down because their market is oversaturated aka "onlyfans overload".

The article talks about a steep decline in the past ~year / post-covid. OnlyFans has been around since 2016. They are also fairly distinct. Not sure you can pin it all on OF.

Just because OnlyFans has been around for eight years doesn’t imply that it’s been popular for that long.

Sample size of one, but I personally had not heard of it until 2020, after some YouTuber drama, and I am a somewhat terminally online human. I suspect it didn’t reach broad cultural awareness for a fair bit longer than that; I don’t remember any people IRL talking about it until OF talked about not allowing adult content like a year later.

>Just because OnlyFans has been around for eight years doesn’t imply that it’s been popular for that long.

Sure, but it's been popular longer than the time period talked about in the article. And, as I mentioned, I think the markets are somewhat distinct.

Are they actually distinct?

Pretty much my entire life (and certainly since I was a teenager from experience) it has been trivial to get porn for free on the internet. I thought people paid for OnlyFans (and strippers) because it feels more "interactive"?

>Are they actually distinct?

I mean, I don't have data, so I don't know. My intuition and anecdotal experience says yes, they would be.

To start with an example: when I used to go out on the town with some buddies, we might end up at strip club at the end of the night after the bars close. OnlyFans wasn't out at the time, but I can guarantee that we wouldn't cap our night off by group-watching OnlyFans.

I have also had some rowdier nights with account managers trying to win over my business who would take me out to a higher end strip club. Again, I cannot imagine them taking me back to a hotel for a cozy OnlyFans viewing.

But I think it boils down to the completely different experiences. One is delivered through a monitor, one is physically there in front of you.

Yeah, fair, upon thinking about it I think OnlyFans more exists to simulate a "long distance girlfriend" instead of a "stripper", which can have similar but still different roles.

> The economy as a whole is doing well, but people aren't

Yeah, that means your measurement of "the economy" is lying. And that you are in a recession.

There's no mixing of technical and colloquial terms here. All that is there is a lying indicator. And if people insist that incorrect number is real, those people are lying too.

Where's the lie? The economy, the system, is a machine. The humans that happen to compose it are by and large either raw materials or wear parts, not output. People can be having an _awful_ time while the system functions beautifully. It's not for them, they're for it.

The entire goal of the machine is to supply the humans.

It's not a parasitic alien.

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