It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers).
Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!
Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!
Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...
But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that.
But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!
A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
PaulHoule•49m ago
quantummagic•41m ago
TylerE•40m ago
meatmanek•26m ago
jfengel•15m ago
TylerE•40m ago
We live in a banana republic.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal...
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...