BahRamYou
7mo ago
Yeah, that's true, and those are all good points for how inflation calculations are not the most scientifically objective measurement.
But interest rates are different because they're just straight up not included at all in the consumer price index
I know that economists give a lot of reasons for that. But I suspect that part of the reason is that any economist who's really good at math gets recruited into finance instead, where he can make vastly more money, so the people who work in academic economics tend to be risk-adverse and kind of weak at math.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Lots of them here illegally claiming asylum (or just straight up hopping the border). Very few here legally on work visas. That makes a difference.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
If the government takes $50,000 for every birth within the USA each year, and puts it into a broad market fund returning 6% a year (this is conservative), at age 70, that's worth $2,953,796.51.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that the stock market isn't a magical money machine. There's no particular limit on money being invested- banks create money out of thin air all the time. The reason stocks appreciate is that we limit how much money banks can create, and that the economy overall is growing. If the government throws in an extra 10 trillion dollars into the stock market, all that happens is that stocks overall grow slower because they're weighted down by all this useless government money.
I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."
As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.
It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.
So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Define "lots of people." My understanding is that there's a lot of people with a fantasy of "someday" building their own craftsman cottage, where money is not an issue. But very few people want to go out and hang drywall to make low-cost apartments.
Its complicated.. i know there's a lot of charts and statistics to argue that working class living standards have gone up recently. But the "lived experience" of many people, which they've been screaming for 4 years, is that their living is being destroyed by inflation. I suspect there's a bit of both.... some people overestimate inflation, but the official inflation statistics also miss some important things, like home mortgage rates doubling.
At any rate, if working class wages have risen despite the immigration, what's the problem? @Corvos this is also my reply to you. I think America clearly has "the stomach" to do a lot, since we elected Trump again. The question is what are we going to do? Nothing, i guess?
You say i should stop "reasoning from first principles", but that's what you're doing. The 1960s weren't some golden age of American prosperity. The average wage was far, far lower back then than it is today. The average person lived in a small, low quality house shared with a large family or many roommates. The average job was shit. They also had a huge underclass of both black Americans and refugees from 3rd world countries, in much worse poverty than we have today.
Please, show me your ideal society so that we can stop using reasoning.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Do you think the last 4 years has been good for American cohesion? Because we've gotten pretty much what you describe- higher wages at the low end, paid for by higher inflation overall. But people don't seem happy about it, especially people on the low end.
And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?
the jobs Americans don't want to do
the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do
But those are functionally the same thing. Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever. But you'll also have to massively jack up prices. It doesn't raise overall prosperity, it just raises inflation. People have this fantasy that the entire country can all be rich and prosperous, but it's never been like that, there's always an underclass doing unpleasant work for shit wages, it's just a question of who is going to be that underclass.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
how many is "lots?" My understanding is that those places have temporary work visas, but no real path to long-term citizenship.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
But what will @WhiningCoil do if he needs to use the Photoshop shape tool to draw a circle... (https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/k866so/gimpphotoshop/)
BahRamYou
7mo ago
White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions
That's how I (and I think a lot of Trump voters) feel about it. For a long time now the standard line has been that immigration is good, as long as it's legal and limited to people with some credentials. Which basically means either middle class white-collar migrants, or students aiming to enter that class. We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do. But instead there's millions of them here competing for scarse positions in the upper-middle class.
I guess from the point of view of Musk and other billionaires, the middle class is so far below them that he feels no threat there. For me in the middle class, I don't see much threat from the lower class, but I can see how a low-wage worker in the border states might feel more of a threat. I'd like to live in a society more like Dubai or Singapore, where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
It's not "in his closet," he's been publicly accused by multiple women and it led to his TV show being stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations
That said, those accusations don't seem very bad and I still kinda like the guy and wish him well.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
how do you "master" English? Or any language? I think all of us speak, read, and write it pretty well, but there's always room for improvement.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
how were the Democrats unfriendly to Tech? especially the American big tech sector. They wanted to ban TikTok (foreign competition) while giving big subsidies to Tesla and lots of nasa dollars to SpaceX. They allowed the Twitter buyout to go through and basically let Musk do whatever he wanted.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
This makes me wonder why Musk even backed Trump in the first place. Surely he must have realized that the Democrats are the much more immigration-friendly party.
Did he think he'd be able to control Trump and the Republicans? if so, he's going to realize the limits of how much power money can buy you.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I had another thought about this. Given the type of money you're talking about... screw renting a table. What if you just buy the whole damn club? One of my many many frustrations with clubs is that the staff often hog the attention of women for themselves. If you're the owner, I guess you can mog them all. Or tell them to encourage women to come talk to you. Then you can also have a private room without the loud music so you can actually talk. Of course, I have absolutely no experience with this, and I've never even heard of someone doing that, I just feel like that's a power move that could work if you throw enough money at it.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Ok, but what makes it interesting? It used to be that people took photos to comemorate a real moment in time. That "grainy photo of some crappy sandwich" might be the sandwich you ate on your birthday, or you wedding, or your graduation, or whatever. Now, people have to get a catered sandwitch with a professional-looking photo to "remember" those occasions.
never played civ 1
I'd recommend giving it a try sometime. First because its such an iconic piece of gaming history, and its amazing they managed to include so much and get it right on the first try. But even today, it holds up.
Its very simple and streamlined, compared to later civ games. There's a quirky charm to its simple cartoon graphics. Theres no "filler", so you can play a full game reasonably quickly.
And the combat! Its highly random, just a single dice roll based on the stats. A tank (attack 10) vs a spear (defense 2) has a 1 in 6 chance to lose, even without any defendive bonuses. And if you lose on defense, you lose everything. This leads to wild fluctuations back and forth, so you have to be flexible and adjust on the fly. It also means that the technologically inferior civ still has a good chance to catch up and win, whereas the later games are something of a foregone conclusion once someone gets a solid tech lead.
edit- now that i think about it, a lot of the stuff they added in civ2 really broke the balance of civ1. The harbor makes ocean tiles way too strong, and being able to negoiate with barbarians and other civs makes your undefended cities way too easy to defend. Throw in the pikemen to deter early mounted aggression, and the ridiculous power of Mike's Cathedral in civ2 to deter unhappiness, and it's just way too easy to expand in civ2. civ1 has a much better balance between economy and warfare.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I guess we'll see if further details emerge. But to me this looks like someone utterly deranged, with no coherent plan at all. Maybe he had some recent health issue like Luigi, or maybe he cracked from the stress of working as a doctor for so long.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
I'm with you, civ4 has a ton of tactical depth to its combat system, and I get annoyed when people don't see it. I think the main problem is that a lot of new players don't like seeing their catapults die (which they usually do when used for collateral damage), so they never really figure out the 'collateral damage' system. They also seem to feel guilty about using nukes in the late game, for some reason. Notably the AI does not share that guilt, and will freely use catapults or nukes all over the place.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
That, and for a video game they also have to balance the type of leaders. Tubman works as a militaristic-type leader. There was a certain amount of criticism of past civ games in that most of the aggressive/warmonger type leaders came from extinct civilizations in Asia/Africa/MesoAmerica, while the financial/industrial leaders were clustered in Europe and America. The latter tend to be better leaders, and also feel more "civilized." In particular there were very few female war-type leaders.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way.
Man, I don't agree with this at all! I feel like our hyper-online society is increasingly sorting into hyper-specific bubbles with very strict standards of how you're supposed to behave, with harsh criticism of anyone who doesn't follow the norms. And now that everyone owns a smartphone with an HD-camera, there's increasing pressure to present yourself online with an absolutely perfect selfie in a killer pose. When I look at my parents' old photos, it's mostly blurry polaroids in awkward poses because none of them were expected to be pro models.
BahRamYou
7mo ago
You could still try it one just to see how you like it. I think money just removes sone of the risks and potential pitfalls, like women turning you down for having bad clothes.
sex workers and/or sugar daddy-ing
As someone who's tried both, i think there is a meaningful difference. Sex workers are just sex, and wilder. Sugar babies are more normal and more like a real girlfriend experience.
Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."
My understanding is that most people doing construction in the US, especially in the low-paid jobs, are people born in Mexico or Central America. Some came her legally, some illegally, some... who knows. The "boom and bust" is often solved by those people moving back and forth across the border. It's not going to be solved by raising wages slightly so that a recently laid-off code monkey takes a job hanging drywall.
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