Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
It’s so much more than that though, imho.
For one thing, it’s not merely people “posing” as professionals - i.e. those who have no credentials to show - but the actual professionals themselves who are often the source of misinformation. Remember when Trump told people to drink bleach (and then two guys in Kansas literally did precisely that)? He also told people that sunlight can destroy the virus - I know people irl who when they got sick, they went outside to sunbathe… in the dead of winter, in sub-freezing temperatures.
For another, there are charts & graphs of news media outlets from before being bought out by billionaires vs. after that, which conclusively prove that the name of the buyer is mentioned drastically less often (and most especially in a negative context) after that purchase compared to before it. If “reporters” - the literal card-carrying members of this establishment - cannot be trusted to tell the news, then who can?
To become TRULY informed about something… takes many, MANY years. When I was a kid, I believed in trickle-down economics, because that’s what I was told. I even voted based on that. Many people still do believe it, but not in spite of listening to their news organization of choice, and rather b/c of it.
I upvoted your comment bc I think it adds value to the conversation, but ultimately I disagree with your ending sentence: it seems far more likely that those who speak out against “the establishment” will end up in jail, thus turning that into one more tool for those who speak “untruths” to remain in political power, than for the reverse to happen.
My latter statement needs to legally be specifically limited to disinformation on specific topics. Posing as a doctor and giving faje health advice, posing as an investor, etc.
Will it cover all disinformation sources? God no, you are 100% right that major news outlets are a captured market now.
But cracking down on some disinformation is better than nothing.
During Covid 2020, there was a study that found the vast majority of disinformation could be sourced back to like, I want to say it was like a total of only a couple dozen specific people? Like a small handful of trolls basically could be blamed for a huge amount of disinformation. Some of them profited off it.
I think cracking down on the “source” points of bullshit could be a good starting point to at least taking a very large chunk out of the problem.
(100 bucks says many times it will be found to be Russian or Chinese actors at play in one way or another)
Aren’t the things that you describe "already* illegal? Not that rich white people ever face any consequences for things these days, but… even so, aren’t there technically laws in place for that already? “Fraud” for one.
Which illustrates that regardless of Right or Wrong, a thing that is not enforced is basically not a thing at all - a mere suggestion that people can feel free to ignore, especially if their finances depend on them doing so.
Whereas conversely, that same issue in reverse, let’s call it Wrong or Right, if it receives oh let’s say Congressional backing, receives legal protections. At worst, imagine someone doing a crime, then immediately receiving a Presidential pardon, was it really a “crime” then? (Yes, obviously, but… is it though? Not by all definitions of that word.)
So you are right, but naive: “misinformation” is not something that you or I get to define, but rather those in power do, hence they will twist and pervert it to suit their own ends.
I see that you are trying to avoid the “politics” surrounding the topic and trying to discuss it in isolation or that, but that is simply not how the world of humans has ever worked, at any point in our existence. Like, at best that only works when all sides are participating in a “good faith” effort to arrive at The Truth - and yes, under those conditions what you said is an effective means, e.g. a doctor who gives bad advice regardless of the criminal court system can lose their medical license that is governed independently - but the problem is that wherever politics gets involved, we can no longer depend on people acting in good faith anymore.:-(
Fraud doesn’t necessarily cover socialed7a as you aren’t selling a product or directly profiting off a service you are selling, so it’s a gray area.
You can have multiple layers of abstraction between the disinformation and actual income stream with social media influencers, which heavily muddies the water.
But at this time, AFAIK no… it’s not illegal in the US to cosplay in medical outfit and say random shit on Instagram.
They are defined, and we are talking about disinformation, not misinformation.
Disinformation is the purposeful spreading of factually incorrect info willfully and knowing it’s wrong.
Misinformation is the same but not knowing it’s wrong, basically “on accident” or because you genuinely think it’s the truth.
For disinformation to be legally acted on it would be up to the prosecutor to prove without a shadow of doubt that the defendant knew the info was wrong and benefited from still spreading it.
Which you can guess is very difficult to price, you’d need effectively to convince a jury that the person didn’t truly think they were right.
There are already precedents for this, as there is a type of disinformation that is illegal right now, and that is Libel.
The Depp v. Heard case was a well published example of this. The prosecters had to effectively prove that Heard truly knew she was lying and benefited from that lie, and acted to deceive. An extremely high bar to prove.
But they had evidence photos of her clearly doctoring photos, testimony of witnesses that went against her accounts, text messages, etc.
So it’s a high bar but not an impossible bar.
The same would be the bar for making “professional disinformation” illegal. You’d need to prove the person knew they were lying, which is very tough but not impossible (you’d be surprised how often these idiots just admit to it outright)
Who will enact this grand plan though? Lawyers? Politicians? Scientists? Congressional funding controls all of those, and already-known facts are choosing to be ignored right this very second. So yeah, very few here will disagree with you that disinformation should not be prosecuted - what people are saying is that there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. How to get it DONE?
But far, Far, FAR worse than that even, asking Congress to do this for us would be… significantly worse than not doing that. Congress will use this tool as a weapon to enact the precise and exact opposite of what you say: instead of shutting down the dis-information sources, they will shut down the pro-information ones. Remember all the rhetoric against Fauci? Politicians care about facts, if and only when they can use them to further their own agendas.
Congress is the very source of much of the disinformation going around right now. They aren’t going to stop simply b/c we ask nicely. Nor are they likely to cooperate. Instead, if what you are saying were proposed as a law, they are likely to simply gladly accept the gift that we offered them, then proceed to bash our heads in with it.
That is my own two cents anyway. And as you can see, I am not terribly trusting:-). For example, China is doing exactly what you are proposing - though young people there do not seem terribly happy with the results:-(.