Yes, the best time for her to step down would have been earlier (same issue with Biden dropping out). But the second best time is now.

Not perish.

To look virtuous without contributing anything substantive towards your cause.

At this point, the one substantive thing Sotomayor can do is resign and make way for an ideologically aligned replacement. And this, she doesn’t do.

If she’s so concerned, she should resign. Let Biden nominate her replacement.

By staying on, she’s basically signalling she doesn’t care about the court going 7-2 after she drops dead during Trump’s second term. No lessons learned from the RBG fiasco. What’s the point of writing these long eloquent dissents that never end up swaying anything?

US presidents acting in their official capacity were always immune to prosecution for murder. Johnson and Nixon wiped out entire villages in Vietnam, never held accountable.

Polling of hypotheticals is notoriously flaky. If a fresh D comes in as nominee, all the “have to beat Trump” talking points will still be there, and all the “this guy has dementia” talking points will be wiped away. It’s hard to imagine any other nominee having negatives that could be worse than credible accusations of dementia.

Edit: except for Harris.

According to Biden,

• Trump is a once in a generation threat to democracy that must be defeated at any cost.
• He, Biden, an 81 year old guy with even lower approval ratings than Trump, should be the guy who goes up against Trump. Nobody else on the D bench should be allowed to try.

Great logic.

Oh by the way, there are no signs that Sotomayor is planning to retire either…

Oh good, I guess Biden has absolutely nothing to worry about then…

Okay, so he’s still able to read off a teleprompter and seem “forceful”. Now put him in front of the editorial board of any major newspaper for an hour long interview.

From the individual consumer’s point of view, it totally makes sense to keep guzzling gasoline. US gas prices are far cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world, even after inflation. US carmakers have priced EVs at premium price points, and the charging infrastructure is mediocre. Add to this Biden’s lock-out of EV imports and efforts to keep gas prices down ahead of the elections.

Anyway, it’s a difficult set of problems, but I would not characterize Biden administration’s climate record as being “full of wins”. They’re like a startup that brags about receiving lots of VC funding (big wins!), but flailing about when it comes to delivering an actual product.

The Biden admin’s main selling point on climate is bragging about how much funding they’ve gotten from Congress. That’s a legislative achievement, but the execution part – which is the point of their branch of government – has been incredibly rocky. You got $7.5B in funding for EV charging yielding 8 EV chargers nationwide. And Biden has slapped big tariffs on Chinese solar panels and EVs, so that renewables will get more expensive and American carmakers who are skeptical about the EV transition will get to drag their feet even more.

TLDR: Unskew those polls! Media biased against Democrats! No one could possibly vote for a convicted felon! Biden is fine!

Sheesh.

Saul Goodman probably would…

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

Half of this article’s word count seems to be the writer snarking about how he doesn’t care about these games and doesn’t know much about them. I guess it’s good to show contempt for your audience…

Don’t cry. Retire so that Biden can nominate your replacement.

Schrodinger’s commencement speech:

The idea of prices going up and down by the same amount is based on an equilibrium situation. This isn’t ruled out; it could very well be that the high profits of grocery companies is transient (or “transitory” as they say). But in the short run, prices don’t move in lockstep.

Aside from market power or collusion, there are other reasons prices could shift more quickly for some sectors than others (even as all prices are going upward). For example, does the industry rely on long term contracts or short term contracts? Is inflation hedging widely available for the goods and services in question? Is the activity more or less sensitive to interest rates?

But these are questions about relative prices. Instead of playing a game of whack a mole, better not to set off inflation in the first place.

When an economy undergoes inflation, not all prices rise by the same amount. That’s one of the reasons high inflation can be so disruptive. For example, wages (the price of labor) often rise some time after other prices, to the detriment of some wage earners.

It’s pretty believable that grocery store chains have acquired enough market power that they’re able to pass on all their cost increases to customers, and more, thereby increasing their profit rate. But the fact that individual companies and sectors are well placed to cope with inflation doesn’t explain the economy-wide and world-wide inflation.

We can also look at the “companies have market power” explanation using the overall labour share, which measures how much income is going to labor vs capital, economy wide. It doesn’t seem to have shifted much during the recent bout of inflation. But again, individual wage earners have seen huge disparities, including some who have been made much worse off by the inflation.

No, interest rate hikes significantly postdated the inflation. Fed started hiking in March 2022, and by that time annualized CPI inflation rate had reached 8 percent. Average over 2021 was 4.7 percent. In any case, interest rates increases are to combat inflation, they are not a cause of inflation

Moreover, wages did go up. US median personal income went from $35.8k in 2020 to $40.5k in 2022. Maybe it didn’t go up as much as other prices, but there’s nothing that says all prices have to rise by exactly the same amount during an inflationary episode.