More from the focus group:
This is a master class in getting things wrong:
- Inflation in California has been lower than the rest of the country.
- According to the USDA, the price of bacon in California under Joe Biden has gone up about 18%, from $5.38 to $6.37.
- Much of that is due to Proposition 12, which mandated larger cages for pigs. Nothing to do with Biden.
- If bacon had gone up from $5 to $15, that would be a 200% increase.
I guess Californians are bad at math.
This reads like a feature dedicated to making ordinary people seem like idiots.
If it still existed, you could print that in Mad Magazine and people would laugh.
No, they'd agree that prices went up 50%...
My Boy pal makes $seventy five/hour at the internet. She has been without a assignment for six months however remaining month her pay have become $16453 genuinely working at the internet for some hours. immediately from the source***** https://shorturl.at/gpOfr
same thing as that shtick of Jay Leno's "Person in the Street" Q&A's, where he'd ask people to find Florida on a map and they'd be all over the place. Of course the ones who picked it out first time, or pointed it out, and Georgia, and Alabama didn't make the edit.
But that was comedy. This is TFN, dedicated to showing us what morons Americans are, and only convincing me to drop the subscription--even if it is a gift.
Kennedy has also jabbed Trump over his reliance on Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. He recently launched a line of merchandise tying Trump and Fauci together.
“Vote for Trump/Fauci 2024,” the new campaign shirts say, along with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Give us another shot!”
Seems to me that some Californians are just plain bad at thinking, but it's a big national club.
I would point out that in 2020 Biden got 63% of the vote to Trump’s 34%. I’d be pretty happy if the rest of the country was as “bad at thinking” as California.
+1
Critical thinking: the other National deficit
We all laughed when Bobby Jindal worried about the Republican Party becoming the Stupid Party. Who would have guessed it was such a viable strategy?
????????????
It's the interviewer who's the problem. This is a perfect example of how American media cower behind any number of pathetic rationalizations for allowing Fox propaganda to be echoed as "the voice of the people." A competent interviewer, without being preachy, pedantic, or confrontational, would correct the propaganda in real time as a natural part of the conversation, without playing "gotcha" or shaming the interviewee. These folks are deeply propagandized, but they're not stupid. I mean FFS, how hard is it to treat people like human beings instead of objects to be scrutinized and used like lab rats? This shit actually makes me incredibly angry - it's exactly how and why reg'lar Americans see "The Media" as a bunch of patronizing elitist assholes. Walks like a duck....
"A competent interviewer, without being preachy, pedantic, or confrontational, would correct the propaganda in real time"
He could try... but everyone's entitled to his or her own truth. And this guy has his own truth.
This is America. Where, as Mr Dooley told us, each man is as good as the next, and often a deal better.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own truth until the effect of one person's truth on another person's life is significant, negative, and unnecessary.
Each person is potentially as good as the next, but if Tom is open minded and skeptical, and Dick is cynical and naive, then Tom is a great deal better.
It's the people who hired the interviewer and gave him his marching orders that's the problem. Do you think for one sweet damn of a second that if the interviewer had done as you prescribed that he would still be employed tomorrow?
I agree wholeheartedly.
It's not that people are ignorant but that the news infrastructure we have today is willfully misinforming the public and people's understanding of what's going on is bullshit.
Fox feeds the public lies & disinformation. NYT reports that the public repeats the lies & disinformation and pretends that's Biden's problem to fix. All it does is amplify the bullshit. NYT would do the country a favor if it restricted its coverage to Taylor Swift and left politics alone.
Patrick Healy might not have the rate of inflation for bacon readily at hand, but it's fair to expect he should know that prices have generally gone up 18% to 20% under Biden (as bacon did), and nothing close to 50%. Why ask what specifically went up 50% unless you're willing to have that conversation, and if you're having that conversation you need to push back respectfully with some facts.
If Jorge said he didn't like Biden bc he took away a women's right to choose, would Healy have corrected him? If Jorge said he didn't like Trump after he shot a man on 5th Avenue, what then?
I dunno, but I suspect people can say whatever they want about a Democratic president and not get push-back from the media.
Biden had a forceful reply to the media in his Time interview. He's sick and tired of not getting credit for all the good crap he's done. Good to see him mad.
I would love to see what you think is a good approach by the interviewer here. Could you give me a script? I'm genuinely interested in how to deal with people that watch the wrong TV all the time.
The interviewer's question "What specifically is up 50 percent?" is a polite way of accusing the interviewee of bullshit. This is a fairly standard way for interviewers to challenge the veracity of someone without being antagonistic or prejudicial. Interviewers on the left (e.g. Daily Show) do this all the time, even (especially) in taped comedy segments to expose the cluelessness of the subject being interviewed.
I don't think it reasonable to expect the interviewer to have bacon prices in that part of California at his fingertips.
But this was being run by Frank Lunz, a Republican focus group consultant. (A very successful and rich one at that.) It's not his job to be a journalist. Nor is it his job to educate the panelists. He's there to find out what the folks believe, rightly or wrongly, and try not to influence them.
If they believe nonsense, or if their logic is misguided, that's important information to understand.
Yeah, it's ultra-small sample size and all that. They are in no way meant to be a representative cross section of the electorate. It's not rigorously scientific. But these consultants will typically try to use the same group repeatedly over months to see how their ideas are changing, and to learn what information is and isn't getting through to them.
Like it or not, these are a sample of the "persuadable" voters in the middle that might determine the election. Probably about 42 states are locked. Probably about 90% of the electorate is locked. It's about 10% of the electorate in 7 or 8 states that will determine who wins and who doesn't, and hearing how some of them think is a useful exercise.
I guess Californians are bad at math.
I guess Jorge has been dosing a little too heavily on Fox/OAN/TruthSocial
If they're watching Fox and OAN of course they're bad at math.
And is he really a Californian?
Yeah, they're bad at math, but that's almost beside the point. If you talk to most people off the street -- think Leno's Jaywalking -- about economics, people only understand inflation and they only understand it in the context of their expectations of where it should be, which is exactly 0% over their lifetime.
Biden ought to be pointing at greedflation, noting how after-tax profits have soared even as incomes remained flat, but the GOP continue to protect businesses. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1ouo2
Good points. People on the street may or may not be "bad at math", but their economic vocabularies and understanding are pretty inadequate.
People mistake "the national debt" for "the deficit", and think the national debt is like their car loan. They think the country can -- and will -- "declare bankruptcy". They think the current price level is "inflation" because it's higher than it was four years ago, although it hasn't changed noticeably in the last two years.
And yet, most journamalists put out these interviews with uneducated innocents with exactly the same weight, or more, than interviews with well-respected economists. Nobel winner Dr Paul Krugman can't compete with Plumber Paul from Podunk. At least Plumber Paul doesn't use any big words like that Noo York snob!
Jorge, doesn't say that prices have risen 200% -- he is 200% behind Trump. He claims that prices are 50% higher -- raising $5 or $6 to $15. I can't speak to whether that is true but if prices rose $5 (from $10) to $15, that is a 50% increase.
Unfortunately, he didn't say prices rose "by" $5 or $6 to $15. He specifically said they rose "from" $5 or $6 to $15. That would be a $10 increase (200% more than $5).
Yep. $15 is 300% of $5, a 200% increase.
And 'by $6' from $9 to $15 would still be a 67% increase.
You must be a maggot.
None of that makes sense. First off, we can read what was written, "Bacon went from $6 or $5 to $15." it says 'from' not 'by'.
A pound of bacon costs from about $4 a pound today, depending upon grade.
Your statement is just as much a fabrication as Jorge's. He's an idiot.
I'm guessing that Mrs. Jorge does the grocery shopping.
"I guess Californians are bad at math."
No. California Trump supporters are bad at math.
Those Californians aren't bad at math. They're bad at politics. They think its a spectator sport and they're armchair quarterbacks.
So long as they stay in their armchairs and away from a ballot this November.
Kevin,
I'm not sure the inability to do basic math is regionally based. Seems to me to be a more generalized problem across the national voting population.
We have issue in reading, writing (handwriting), and math because we stopped making our students do simple things like practice. I visited a third grade classroom recently and I'm shocked by the handwriting quality in third grade. Another issue, give the kids ruled paper for ducks sake. Let them practice with the appropriate tools! Have them keep notebooks. Help the kids learn.
It’s like reading the comments here! ????
I worked with physics and engineering in my career. Most people are weak on quantitative values unless they are really important to the task at hand. This is especially true with percentages. I’d interpret that guys comments as simply saying bacon prices went up a lot. We know that one number is larger than another. We know that an outlier is substantially different than the group. If you asked them to show their work with pencil and paper they’d be stumped.
These guys just want to bash Biden so a bigger number makes them sound scarier. Kind of like how cats puff up their fur to impress other cats. This is why right wingers hate science. Nature is what it is. Nature doesn’t care if you believe in it or not.
Like +10!
It used to be all politics was local...now it's all nationalized.
Motivated reasoning doesn't give a fuck about math.
Jorge was already a Trump voter. He just wants to sound justified.
This is a better way to frame what is actually going on. The rate of inflation, just like unemployment, wages, wealth, standards of living....these facts dont actually matter for many (most) voters.
The guy probably also thinks 50% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, unemployment is 60% and illegal immigrants qualify for welfare and vote in large numbers. As someone once observed, the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. No wonder financial fraud and scams thrive in America like they do.
I don't doubt there's some fancy-pants grocery store in Malibu or somewhere where organic, hand-raised bacon is $15 a pound. But it was previously $12/lb, not $6.
Also no one is saying prices have only gone up 3% since 2020. Jorge doesn’t understand year over year rates or any of the basics of inflation reporting. He needs to start reading more jabberwocking.
Sonoran Desert math: A straight line is the shortest distance between you and shade.
What I realized last night is that these people are engaging in discourse that is very, very similar to what ChatGPT does. Factual accuracy is not a thing with the LLMs. it's just an amalgam of what other people are writing on the internet.
For these humans, it also includes what people are saying in person and on talk radio and TV channels. They aren't engaging in a critical thinking process. They aren't doing fact finding. They want to complain, so they find something to complain about. They say "Fifty percent" because it's a big number (for inflation).
I'm not sure where the $15 bacon comes from but also, it's a "big" number. Maybe someone somewhere posted some "exotic" bacon at a specialty store that was 15 bucks. Or maybe the number just seems big.
Also, they are all imitating Trump, who can't be bothered to get facts and figures right. It's not the point. It's how he *feels*, and he regularly feels that it's so unfair.
Jorge could also be mixing up specific bacon packages (or parroting someone else who did the same).
At my local grocery, the 12oz standard pack is currently $5. The 40oz pack is $15.
One of the problems with the NY Times and legacy media as a whole is that they assume that their typical reader is somebody like the people who work at the newspapers - smart enough to know that what these people are saying is nonsense and polite enough to not want to burst their bubbles of stupidity. That's why they don't correct these idiots, because they figure "just reporting the ignorance is enough to get the point across". And it's not! People in general are morons! Across the socio-economic spectrum!
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