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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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13 Jul, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Inflation wasn't just lumber
Note: People are reporting this as month-on-month or year-on-year, but a 0.9% monthly rise is an annualized rate of 11.3%.

Even if some weird stuff in the car market is half of that, this is quite a bit of inflation.
My guess is still that this inflation is transitory, but my belief in that assessment is weakening somewhat.
Also, I would like the "it's just cars/gasoline/travel/leisure/hospitality/semiconductors/lumber" people to give me a list of commodities whose prices they think SHOULD be included in our assessment of inflation...
Like, if you squint, you can see some signs for optimism that inflation is letting up once you strip out X and Y and Z...but you do have to squint.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Jul
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought Trump might attempt a coup after the election. He and other military brass were prepared to stop it.

He explicitly and repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler, and MAGA activists to brownshirts.

cnn.com/2021/07/14/pol… Image
This should tell you at least two things:

1. The liberals making these comparisons since 2015 were not as hysterical as they were accused of being.

2. The U.S. Military is not going to stand for a fascist coup, much less aid and abet one.
Milley explicitly called the Proud Boys "Nazis", and said "These are the same people we fought in World War 2". Image
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Jul
1/A brief thought about the Critical Race Theory wars.

When my dad was in high school, a girl he knew got pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had an illegal underground abortion, which was botched and rendered her permanently infertile...
2/She was also a devout Catholic, so this caused a huge rift with her family. She developed severe mental issues because of this, and was basically incapacitated for life.

The ban on abortion utterly ruined her life.
3/When I was young, Culture Wars in America were all about abortion. Right-wingers would picket abortion clinics and pass laws to make abortion harder to get. Occasionally someone would even murder a doctor for doing abortions.
Read 7 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
12 Jul
1/Today's Substack post is about foreign policy. It's about the looming threat of Cold War 2.

I don't want Cold War 2, and you shouldn't either. Cold wars are bad. But we don't always have good options.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-didnt…
2/The post was prompted by allegations coming from the Left that the U.S. is trying to start a new cold war with China.

For example, here's the open letter from the Sunrise Movement:
foe.org/wp-content/upl…
3/Sunrise and the other groups never specify whether the "anti-China rhetoric" is criticism of China's human rights abuses.

Anyway, here is Bernie Sanders in Foreign Affairs:
foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
Read 25 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
11 Jul
We've reached some sort of inflection point in our politics where things have stopped meaning anything, and have become in-group signals without any external significance.
Practically no one outside each little clique understands who's getting attacked or supported, or what the dunks even mean.

All the shouters have found product-market fit now. They have their messages down, their followings are primed to mash the retweet button. Everyone stays in their lane. There's little real discussion, just an infinite recursion of hipsterisms.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
9 Jul
I need to do a whole running series of stories about the weird encounters I have when I wear my "Free Hong Kong" shirt around San Francisco. Everyone stops me and wants to talk politics.
Today a Greek immigrant real estate developer stopped me to give me a very dadcon lecture about how socialist kids are just lazy, and if you work hard and believe in God, anyone can succeed.
In the middle of his spiel he stopped to say hi to his friend, a Black construction worker who was walking down the street with a boombox blasting Kpop.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
8 Jul
I always thought the story "Cat Person" was not very good, since it doesn't dive into the emotional life of its protagonist/narrator.

But also, it turns out it was a dark distortion of a reality that was much more benign:

slate.com/human-interest…
This, by the way, is why I think "realist" fiction is actually a more fantastical kind of fantasy than the kind with dragons.

In "realist" fiction, the fantasy is how the characters feel and behave. But unlike dragons, people believe this fantasy represents reality.
People will read "Cat Person" and think they now know the dark truth about human relationships. But the real relationship "Cat Person" was based on, while not ideal, was much sweeter and healthier than the dark fantasy depicted in the story.
Read 4 tweets

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