When the airline mask mandate was lifted by a Federal judge in April, most people cheered, but there were a loud segment of hysterics and memes that predicted doom. These are just two examples. After a very busy summer travel season we can now take a look back.
▪️After the mandate was lifted, cases rose slightly, and anecdotally you probably heard of many get Covid. But nowhere near prior spikes when the mask mandates were in place, nor was this summer any worse than the summer of ‘21.
▪️Looking at hospitalizations and deaths (posted in comments) is even more striking. These were much lower than the prior year, and didn’t see major spikes like in prior waves.
▪️Oswalt’s headline was misleading even at the time, as it referred to two UK airlines but was posted in the wake of the US ban ending. The CBS article ignored that restrictions had only been lifted within the UK and masks were still required on most of these airlines’ flights.
▪️It also ignored several other airlines who lifted (or stopped enforcing) mandates at that time which didn’t have staffing issues. And, ignored the massive cancelations last winter when mandates were still in place. In short, it was a laughable attempt at correlation/causation.
▪️In fact, after the UK mandate ended, cases plummeted and stayed relatively low all summer.
▪️The reality is that after a summer with planes and airports packed, with the vast majority of passengers and crew unmasked, there weren’t any serious health or staffing issues due to Covid. The hysterics and doom memes were wrong once again.
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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