So during covid pandemic, a big issue that I kept hearing about in the news and on the Journal podcast was that the economy is hot which is bad and causes interest rate spikes from the Fed if you are in the U.S. or Bank of Canada if you are in Canada.

tbh, I never fully understood that. we live in a consumerism, materialistic and capitalist society. i thought that people buying non-stop was what corporations and American govt valued, hence why we are hit with ads everywhere we go. and yet it was somehow a bad thing and was causing economic issues?

so I looked into it and came across a reddit post that basically explained it in simplistic terms like this:
the iPhone costs 1,000$. now, if not many people can afford the iPhone cause it's out of budget, what that implies is that not many people have 1,000$ which means that 1,000$ is hard to get which raised the value of the dollar, which is good for the economy.
If a lot of people can afford the iPhone, it means lots of people can afford to spend 1,000$ which means it's not as unique position to be in anymore, to have 1,000$ in spending money which apparently makes it worth less, cause more people have access to such funds.
Moreover, besides lowering the value of the dollar, more people being able to afford the iPhone is apparently also not a tenable situation cause apparently supply for iPhones could not meet the demand if it's suddenly now in so much more demand, so the value of the dollar going lowering is not only bad for the economy, but also has an effect on supply-chain issues.

Now, if I understand correctly, during covid and shortly after, the stimulus checks were given to people, both middle and lower class. the stimulus checks allowed for lower class to be able to afford more basic necessities from what I heard. This also however, also caused middle class people to be able to afford both more basic necessities and also to spend on luxuries (gonna continue with my current example of the iPhone). So the lower and middle class people having more spending power to be able to afford their necessities and maybe splurge a bit on luxuries causes the value of the dollar to go down cause now things are more affordable to people. and the value of the dollar going down causes wall street/the fed to freak the fuck out. and this causes them to raise interest rates, which has a domino effect of causing unemployment which obv leads to less people having spending power which causes a dampening effect on how much people are buying which brings the value of the dollar back up and the Fed is happy again.

I know I have probably oversimplified some parts cause I am not an economics person and God forbid the Journal podcast actually do their job and breakdown how the economy is screwing people so most of what I know comes from online research and what I can glean from the news but is anything I said incorrect?

cause if what I said is correct, that means that whenever the government keeps saying "the economy is fine" in response to people saying the times are tough, I get confused how that's a counterargument from the govt and not actually a subtle confirmation that times are tough for people. cause what it actually means is "the value of the dollar is fine, but the people are hurting cause that is needed for the dollar to be fine"?

Ten years ago, I got my first job in the field of languages. I was a "translation engineer", working on tooling for translators. I very quickly was told to never represent a language by a flag.

I'm sharing this here because this is something you either know, or don't, and many people don't.
Why is simple: languages do not map 1:1 to a country.

• A country can have multiple languages
• A language can be spoken in multiple countries
• A language can exist without being spoken in any country
• A country can exist without an officially recognised language

Today as I sit here, I'm at a language meetup where language tables each have a flag on them. Well, none of us at the Russian table are comfortable with that Russian flag, so we just turn it around and write "RU" on the other side.

Wikipedia has an article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

So how are you supposed to do this correctly ? ISO 639 has a list of 2-letter and 3-letter codes for languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

• You want to represent a language, use ISO 639-1: a two letter code. For example, "English" is "en" and "French" is "fr".
• You want to represent a language, but wish for a larger code for some reason (such as disambiguation with state or country codes)? You can use ISO 639-2/T: 3-letter codes for the languages. For example,
  "English" is "eng" and "French" is "fra".
• You want to represent a language, as spoken in a particular country? ISO 639 and ISO 3166 work together. You can represent "English as spoken in England" as "en_GB", "American English" as "en_US", "Canadian French" as "fr_CA", and so on. (This is a very flexible standard, allowing for a lot of variations and a topic for a more motivated person than me. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag)
• You want to represent the abstract notion of translations or internationalization, such as for an icon to change the language? This wikipedia article may help. The two most common variations I've seen are an icon that has "A" and "文" together, or some kind of globe icon.
• You want to represent a currency? Use ISO 4217 currency codes: "USD" for US Dollar, etc. Some countries have multiple currencies, don't use a flag without disambiguating somewhere.
• You want to represent a country? You can use a flag, I don't care. But even then, ISO 3166 will probably be less political :)

(I am not directly posting as a link, as I have originally shared this over Gemini, which I don't think a majority of the people here have a client for, and directly linking to a proxy just seemed weird to me. So here are both the original and proxied links for people to choose between)

gemini://ebc.li/posts/open-standards-are-simple.gmi (HTTP Proxy)