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The national urban poverty rate plummeted from 52.9% to 38.1% in six months, while extreme poverty halved to 8.2%, marking the sharpest decline in decades.

President Javier Milei’s administration achieved this while slashing public spending by 5% of GDP and navigating a 1.7% economic contraction in 2024. Key drivers included targeted welfare programs and inflation control.

The government expanded the Universal Child Allowance (AUH) to cover teens up to age 17 and increased food card coverage, directly aiding vulnerable households.

So they cut spending overall, but expanded their Universal Child Allowance. I mean, that right there is probably what did most of the poverty reduction. The article doesn’t really say where the spending cuts came from. Could be they just cut a lot of waste, but it could be they’ve made cuts to important government services, and the effects haven’t necessarily been felt yet.

The IMF projects 5.5% GDP growth for 2025, fueled by rebounding consumption and investment. This turnaround challenges conventional wisdom that austerity inevitably harms vulnerable populations, showing market-oriented policies can coexist with poverty reduction when paired with precise safety nets.

Does it? Again, we don’t know what’s been cut and we don’t know what the long term effects of those cuts will be. All we know is that they made significant cuts overall, while also expanding two specific safety net programs. Admittedly, that has resulted in a significant reduction in the urban poverty and extreme poverty rates, for now, which is undoubtedly a good thing, but only time will tell if those will last.

This reads like neoliberal propaganda, but honestly Javier Milei is right of even most neoliberals. I seriously doubt the expansion of the Universal Child Allowance and the increased food card coverage will last. I’m certain Milei will want to cut those programs, at some point. He is anarchocapitalist adjacent, so I’m sure he wants to get as close as possible to no government spending at all, eventually.

We live in a rural area, outside any city boundary. The county doesn’t have any building codes, and there were only a handful of state codes we had to adhere to.

I should have paid for a home inspection before we took the keys, but we were in a hurry to move in. The build took so much longer than we had planned for that the construction loan matured, went to long term, so we were paying both rent and a mortgage.

The problem is these builders don’t want to pay for competency. They’d rather pay immigrants pennies on the dollar for shoddy work. They charge the same for the houses and just pocket the difference. We get a shitty house and the builder gets greater profits.

Oh man, let me tell you. We built our house a few years ago and it was an ordeal. After a while I just stopped asking the builder to fix things because I knew it would be faster and better to fix them myself or get someone else to fix them. It has added tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of the home, and all of that has come out of our own pocket, we didn’t get to roll all those extra costs into the mortgage loan.

Some of the corners they cut were unbelievable. They didn’t put any insulation in our attic. None. Our master shower drain was just draining directly into the crawl space, not hooked up the drain pipe at all. There was also no insulation in the crawl space, nor was there a vapor barrier. Poor workmanship everywhere, the floors especially are ass.

Several people have told me I should sue the builder, and I probably should, but I’d have to pay for a lawyer, and it would probably take months and months. It’s an expense and a hassle I don’t want, so instead I just tell everyone to never, ever use Taylor Homes of Nashville. Ever. Even though, every other builder is probably just as bad.

It’s not just about winning, it’s about ideology. Embracing demsoc candidates wouldn’t just be a change in strategy, it would be a change in the party’s core ideology. Ideology is why political parties exist. Political parties are usually based in ideology, that’s why in other democracies there are liberal parties, conservative parties, socialist parties, Libertarian parties, etc. But here in the US we don’t have a system of political ideology plurality, so the two parties that we do have are often fighting internally to determine what the core ideology of the party will be.

You know why so many Democrats don’t like demsoc candidates? Because they’re not demsocs. They’re social liberals or neoliberals, and they want the Democratic party to remain an ideologically Liberal party.

If our democracy were more like most every other democracy on the planet, the neoliberals and the demsocs would each have their own party, and they wouldn’t need to be engaged in this constant, zero sum fight for control of one party.

“Settlers”

Because the pro-Israel lobby in the US is just that powerful.

No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.

Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?

Get out your spray paint, kids.

Poor analogy that has no relevance to the political landscape.

I think it’s relevant. I can tell you that are many voting age Americans who feel held hostage by our highly restrictive two party system. You’re not one of them. That’s fine, I’m not trying to describe your experience. I don’t know you, so I don’t know how that would even be possible. I’m describing my experience. You can choose to completely dismiss my experience if you want but I think that shows a real lack of empathy. We get it, you don’t care that millions of Americans don’t feel represented by either political party, but I do care.

I could run, but I would almost certainly lose.

The problem is our defacto two party system. With only two parties, a large percentage of the electorate is likely to be left without representation. I don’t want to prevent Democrats from having the representation they want, I just feel like I deserve to have representation too.

Edit: I feel like I need to explain this. For those who don’t know, this is from Silence Of The Lambs. The person in the top panel is a serial killer who has the woman in the bottom panel trapped in an old well. He’s telling her that she has to rub lotion on her skin or else he will punish her.

The meme is that we, independent American voters, are the woman trapped in the well, and the two-party, American political system is the serial killer. Liberal technocrats tell us that we must vote for them, regardless of whether or not we feel they will actually represent us, because if we don’t we will get “punished” with the Republicans.

There is no question that complying with the serial killer is a better option than failing to comply and receiving his punishment. But, regardless, we’re trapped in a fucking well, held against our will, by a psycho. Similarly, there’s no question the Democrats are a better option than the Republicans, but either way we’re being ruled against our will, by people we do not like or believe in.

May I ask what country this was in? My wife works in addiction and rehab here in the US and she’s astounded at this. She says at her facility the max for detox is five days, and max rehab is 28 days.

I will never understand Trump’s appeal. I assume so many men prefer Trump because they think he is somehow a strong leader, but he isn’t. He’s weak and stupid. Maybe that’s the problem: they want strength, but they don’t know what real strength is, so they mistake arrogance and malignant narcissism for strength. It’s insecure men being led by insecure men.

It’s so interesting that just before Trump there was Obama, an actual strong man. He was confident, articulate, posed and charismatic, as well as caring and empathetic, and the insecure men of this country hated him. They hated him because they thought to be a strong man means walking around beating your own puffed out chest while telling everyone how strong you are. They think that to show that you are strong you have to bully and demean. They’re scared and unsure, and so they overcompensate. A condition that Trump is the poster child for.

People dealing with opioid addiction, pain, depression, anxiety and other conditions should see a health professional to get a prescription for FDA-approved treatments, Hays said.

There’s a reason so many people don’t go the approved route, and instead try self medicating. It’s because our healthcare system is run by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, who care only about maximizing profits.

Seeing a health professional in the US means first getting insurance, which can be its own baffling ordeal, then finding an in network doctor, then spending an hour waiting for the doctor so you can spend 5 or 10 minutes with them (probably being lectured), then, assuming they take your mental health concerns seriously, they’ll just prescribe you a drug anyway. If it’s between that and going down to the gas station and getting a bottle of momentary relief, I get why many people choose the gas station elixir.

“Democrats must be bold and meet this moment,” he said. “This is the urgent work in front of us: to stand up to authoritarianism, to protect care and dignity, and to make life better for the people who count on us.”

Sure, Democrats, be bold. Meet the moment. Stand up to authoritarianism…then immediately fold, faster than Superman on laundry day. But, I don’t doubt you will succeed at making life better for the people who count on you, who are of course your donors, and other elites and oligarchs.

Well, the quote I was responding to used the words “open borders” specifically. I may not understand the meaning of the term, as it is being used here, but hopefully you can understand my confusion. I didn’t realize that “open borders” meant “you can have and enforce borders.” I proceeded on the assumption that those two states exist in opposition to one another.

If they’ll accept Ukrainian law and, you know, not attempt to take over the country, yes why not?

And if the Russians don’t accept those terms? Or, say that they accept them to gain entry only to then carry out a campaign of slow annexation?

During Sunday mass in St Peter’s Square, the pope asked that God ‘open borders, break down walls [and] dispel hatred’

Borders do serve a purpose, though. Should Ukraine open their borders to Russians? There are legitimate reasons for wanting to keep other people out.