▪️This meme claims “base worker pay” has been stuck for 15 years, failing to mention that essentially no full time worker earns the Federal min wage, as I’ve repeatedly shown on this page. Most people would be surprised to learn that avg hourly earnings have actually increased by 64% since 2007, from $20.59/hr to $33.82.
▪️For the reply guys whining about using avg hourly earnings for all workers, if you look at non-supervisory and production workers, their wages increased even more since 2007; 69%, from $17.09/hr to $29.
▪️And leisure & hospitality workers, the lowest paid category, increased even more! A 76% increase since 2007, from $12.07/hr to $21.30.
▪️I’m also skeptical of the claim CEO pay increased 150% during the same time, as that stat comes from a 2020 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left wing activist group. Equilar, which does analysis for the Associated Press, reported this year that median total compensation for S&P 500 CEOs was $14.8M. That’s median not avg, but a long way off from $24M in the meme.
https://www.equilar.com/reports/101-equilar-associated-press-ceo-pay-study-2023
▪️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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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
