brvsft

Clothing has been relatively cheap for at least 30 years, as far as I know.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-cpi-for-...

Not sure why the link doesn't show it, but this link came up on a Google Image search for clothing vs. everything else in CPI. Here's a link to the image itself:

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/clothing.jpg

And the Fed (since the image only goes out to 2013): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAPPSL (apparel) vs. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL (all items)

My only point is, clothing has been cheap for a long time, and hasn't risen with inflation. I can't tell if your comment is saying that fast fashion is responsible for clothing being cheap, or what time "now" specifically refers to, so I'm not going to assume anything about that. Maybe I'm just adding to what you're saying in pointing out that clothing has been cheap for quite a while, and fast fashion has little to do with it (if anything, fast fashion is probably just a product of how affordable clothing is).

Of course, it's affordable because clothes can be manufactured cheaply in quite a few countries. Seems a lot of it is made in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, etc. I doubt the workers there are paid 'well' by our standards here in the US.

Right back atcha.

You don't tell your friend to get a job. You tell your friend they sound like a miserable fuck and some of their problems are of their own making.

I find this argument is utterly destroyed by the fact that the message is a complaint about the 'other side' telling her to modify behavior to spend less money. Yet her behaviors include some really egregious spending. How could I separate the two?

Admittedly, I didn't have to know she made such an egregiously bad decision with her money to know she's wrong. I judged that immediately upon starting the essay because it's yet another angry rant against trivial financial advice that makes no difference and that no one forces you to take. The defensive and personal tone lets me know.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Happens every few months/years, people get up in arms about the Suze Orman meme advice to stop buying $5 coffee. If you're this angry about advice you're under no obligation to take, I know you're getting drunk and spending hundreds of dollars buy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs or have some expensive substance addiction (e.g., cigarettes or weed) you could cut but choose not to. The anger is just so personal it's impossible that it's not coming from self-hatred.

It's not really a circular definition because "impairment" and "goodwill" are two words with their own meanings in accounting/finance, so "goodwill impairment" including those two words separately in the definition isn't circular.

Goodwill is basically the extra value paid one company pays when buying another company. So if Etsy buys Depop for 1.6B, and of that 1.6B, let's say 600M were actual 'assets' (cash, inventory, whatever (not that Depop had those things when purchased)), then Etsy paid $1B (1.6B - 600M) in "goodwill" for Depop. That "goodwill" is basically the Depop brand, the desire for existing and potential customers to use Depop, etc.

Suppose Etsy wakes up one day and realizes that the $1B worth of Depop brand must be worth less. I don't know how they determine this, as the most realistic way would be if they were somehow shopping around to sell Depop off to another buyer, and all the offers are markedly lower than the $1.6B they paid for the same assets + intangibles. That difference is the impairment, to the goodwill.

Not sure if that made it sound less circular. I'm also not an accountant, but I've tried learning quite a bit about the subject.

Wow, $1B goodwill impairment sounds absurd (for a company of Etsy's size). Had to look this up.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/02/02/etsys-1b-problem-t...

> In this case, Etsy believes that it overpaid by $1 billion for Depop and Elo7. A company normally takes write-downs like this when the results of an acquired business don't live up to the expectations at the time of the acquisition. That's not so good, noting that these two businesses are expected to be long-term growth drivers for the company.

AI is not sentient.

> The argument that businesses should never 'harm' their employees by laying them off is a straw man. No one is suggesting that companies be legally bound to keep all employees indefinitely.

I believe it was implied in the comment I replied to. The focus on 'harm' would imply that they believe any harm should be minimized if not eliminated outright.

> However, there is a vast difference between making strategic adjustments and engaging in practices that unduly harm employees for the sake of short-term financial gains.

What evidence do you have to make this claim in the context of Spotify? Are you suggesting that because the CFO sold his stock, therefore the layoffs only occurred specifically with short-term financial gains in mind?

> bankruptcy (a process I don't think you understand based on your comment)

We both know what I'm talking about, details of exactly how bankruptcy affects employees, creditors, and shareholders are unimportant. I'll stop reading your comment here, given you wanted to use the old "you're doing a straw man" and then pull this out.

> But this means that we're ignoring the harm that was done to the people that lost their income and the disruptions that the rest of the org will experience.

As opposed to the 'benefit' that was done while they were granted income?

I'm unsure what your point is. Is a business never supposed to 'harm' its employees? They're never allowed to fire people? What is the logical conclusion of your statement? A business ought to be liable to keep their employees employed forever even if it means the business becomes unprofitable and eventually has to declare bankruptcy, resulting in the firing of all employees? Who prevents the harm then? Or is this where the magical thinking that government will make it all better using the taxes from the other companies and employees that have yet to go bankrupt despite being unable to fire anyone ever?

> "an individual person shouldn't have to pay for this, but it benefits everyone to have it, so we will use collectively pooled resources to create it".

Millions of individuals will pay for it. Got it.

The study of me walking down the street and crossing paths with a homeless man throwing a brick into the street, chasing after it, and throwing it again, all while screaming obscenities to himself.

> I do a thing that I consider bad, but I understand that it is bad, therefore I am good.

This is always one of my favorite takes.

Hey, do me a favor and read the last sentence of my comment. There are only three sentences so it shouldn't be hard to find.

I'll take the bait. It's not so surprising to see "reactionary" politics when social 'progress' continues to become more and more demented. But I'll admit, fake meat is not even present on my list of problems.

I'm guessing the term is supposed to point out the idea that what we think of as normal is actually not.

> The two people I know of who dared to say something were shown the door. Quietly, discreetly, done in a way so they wouldn't dare to sue.

How does this work? If I'm in this position, you'd have to either give me a lot of money or threaten to kill my family. I'd be surprised if a business tried the latter.

I don't know if this is what was meant, but my assumption is that it is quite brazen and crude.

But then I think of some alternative method where they send an ajax request to "sleep.google.com/?t=5" and get a response like "" after five seconds.

Such an accusation coming from a family member is different than when it comes from some random homeless drug addict off of the street.

Flagged without a vouch button. Interesting.

The implication is that this could be the 'unrelated reason', that he lied to the board about sexually assaulting his sister/step-sister/whatever. Of course, I'm not sure who Annie Altman is or how exactly she is related to Sam or if the allegations are true.

The failed audits have no impact on their budget the following year.

I had to sell my home while coordinating a cross-country move. The agent handled everything for me and did a good job on the negotiation given the fact that prices were coming down while this happened.

Considering you had pneumonia, your appetite was low on your list of problems.

Try not eating for three days when you're otherwise healthy, and observe what it does to your body and mind.

The list would need to incorporate apps because a lot of 'websites' that are extremely popular in use are more typically used as apps (e.g., Instagram).

This is quite clearly a list of banks that will prevent you from doing one stupid thing with your money, but will not prevent you from doing many other stupid things with your money.

I am generally against crypto (although was 'for' it 10 years ago). But I wouldn't be happy if my bank did this unless they also put in place similar restrictions, presumably for 'my own good', on transferring money to online gambling apps. I see too many advertisements for online gambling that I'm quite disgusted by it.

The only justifiable rationale for blocking such transactions, IMO, is to try to help your customers from being scammed or, more broadly, putting themselves into a precarious financial situation. Hence why they should have similar blocks on gambling.

But really, where I transfer my money is not the bank's business, and they often offer their own products that would allow people to put themselves into a bad financial position, e.g., trading on margin. So it comes off less as 'this is for your own good' and more as 'we will not allow you to engage in what we see as our competition.'

One time when I was younger, my mom was talking to my grandmother on the phone, in Spanish. I could hear my grandmother on the other end too. They're both yelling. No idea what they were talking about, but I had to ask, something to the effect of, "Mom, are you angry? Why are you and grandma yelling?"

Nope, nothing was wrong. That's just how they talk to each other in Spanish. Weird. It also never occurred to me why I didn't notice until whatever age I was, a teenager in high school. It never really occurred to me that they were always 'yelling' while talking to each other until that moment.

There is the possibility that they really were upset and yelling, but my mother didn't often keep things from me (at least not as far as I know). I also noticed the yelling afterwards, so I'm confident that was me simply realizing that's how they talked after years of not noticing.

You have it reversed. The celebrity endorser is the platform. FTX has no platform, they have money and can buy commercial time. Larry David has his own 'brand', and people like you and I have positive feelings towards it. His mere appearance in an FTX commercial is him lending his platform of positive feelings we all have for him over to the brand of FTX, so that we may associate those positive feelings toward them. That's the endorsement. Even if he said, "FTX fucking sucks, and so does crypto!" in the ad, people would think, haha that's so funny, did he really say that in a commercial?! And the next time they think about crypto they remember their jovial laughter at that dumb ad and "FTX."

I also don't care that he endorsed them and don't think he's at all responsible for people losing money in crypto.

What would due diligence have revealed? If the SEC didn't know it was a fraud at that point, what power does Tom Brady have to figure it out?

I think that's a good question. What do you mean by (moral) authority?

I'd say that local representatives could ignore the residents' wishes in the case that housing costs are too high, coupled with a desire to have a city where younger people can move in and raise families to also expand their tax base. But it's a tenuous argument with a lot of assumptions attached to it.

That said, I am skeptical that many of these cities in the Bay Area are actually representing the residents' wishes. Or perhaps the residents have too much power to stall housing development at local hearings where they are allowed input into what developers do on their own land. And the residents who exercise this power don't always represent the broader consensus in the city. But, I'll admit I am pretty ignorant about how things actually work at this level of local politics, and I know it's going to operate differently in every city and county.