chooky
3d ago
It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.
We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html
chooky
3d ago
But lots of those dividends and asset sales are from retired people, so you are overestimating average income very substantially when you divide by the workforce. One approach would be to look at BLS CEX survey, which has annual average household income of $102k in 2023, with 1.3 earners, so really more like $78k per earner, which is in line with the income per earner for the 80-90th percentile. Top decile income is $168k, so we are probably not getting to $125k per earner until about the 90th percentile. (https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables.htm)
Or you can look at average personal income directly, which gives only $67k in 2024, though I agree that this one is too low because it is everyone 14 and up. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N
$125k seems way too high as an estimate of average income, and $250k is an extremely high salary. I would think a more appropriate threshold would be around $175k. Though I am fairly confused on why a numerical limit on visas would be needed with high salary thresholds and required time commitments, which are already ensuring that you're only bringing in pretty rare abilities.
chooky
11d ago
Watchman convinced me that the Mockingbird editor had a very heavy hand in that book.
chooky
19d ago
You're right, my bad. I think I just remember watching countless book reports of Greenwitch in 5th grade, which was popular due to its low page count.
chooky
19d ago
Pets! At some point in life, when your kids beg for a dog, actually say yes.
Keyless front door lock (like with a number code) is a spectacular lifesytle improvement. You will never lock yourself out, ever.
Otherwise, the acquisition of power tools and knowledge in order to not deal with ridiculously expensive and incompetent contractors is somewhat satisfying.
chooky
20d ago
Sort of... it was ultimately the grandma's misunderstanding of the magic's source/purpose that created the anxieties that led to the magic not working anymore, but it was this abstract anxiety that was the antagonist rather than an outright malevolent force. The only stakes for the magic not working were that the magic was cool and it would be sad for it to not work. To me, actualization/fulfillment is a perfectly good goal for a story.
chooky
20d ago
Greenwitch won the Newberry, so the series would be a pretty common read for 1990s kids.
chooky
26d ago
Early 40s. The skiing injury/insomnia/gastric/heart items are all things that I would put in an acute, or at least "actual malady", category. Your friend's lingering ankle injury is probably more like a chronic condition than acute if we are being really choosy on our diction, but it is nonetheless something being clearly wrong, not the maintenance/preventative work that a nutritionist would generally be for someone without a physiological nutrition/diet problem. I am still missing the purpose of chiropractors, nutritionists, etc, for "normal adults".
chooky
26d ago
The numbers have always been somewhat imperfect but very much not politically gamed, imo. I mean, did Trump want the BLS for the past three months to have changed longstanding procedure in order to put out drastically worse jobs numbers reflecting the estimated impact of the DOGE cuts and other things? Many government agencies are much more wedded to procedure and neutrality rather than a private sector financial analyst who would prioritize being right, though it is worth noting that the Atlanta Fed moved reasonably quickly to correct for the impact of gold imports on GDPnow.
For the BLS, however, this is now somehat changed, and there will be less trust until a real person gets out in charge again and says the right things.
chooky
26d ago
Forget ethics. This seems like a huge financial loss. With AI, there is at least the argument that the AI will be able to scale infinitely once trained. This does not seem true of the clone or whatever.
chooky
27d ago
What are all you guys going to nutritionists and chiropractors and so forth for? Doesnt all that stuff just happen automatically if you eat right and exercise?
I can see a reason to go get cancer, heart, etc, screenings starting at a certain age, but I actually am quite confused why a healthy lifestyle 20-50 year old needs doctors at all beyond screenings and acute things.
chooky
1mo ago
Having read the article and looked at the pictures you linked about the "MAGA themed party", I completely disagree with your quoted description. It is very clear to me that this was a country-themed birthday party for her mom and that the supposedly MAGA comes from hats that read "Make Sixty Great Again". This is a play on pop culture, not a theme. If anything, MAGA-adjacent paraphenalia seems more likely to have been worn as a satire of rural rubes who genuinely support the idea.
Are the people who criticized her for it extremely ridiculous? Was Sweeney's tweeted, purposefully vague response absolutely delicious in its commitment to nonspecificity? Is the ridiculousness of the online reaction an exhibit for my theory that Sweeney is especially a target of women haters due to the prominence of her boobs? Yes, yes and probably.
chooky
1mo ago
I think that part of the backlash is simply because a lot of people started out primed with a disdain for Sweeney, mainly because of the perception that her popularity is driven purely by her looks, namely her curves. My wife got mad when I said I thought she was great, but my position was that at that point she had pretty much been 2/2 on starring in absolutely amazing shows (Euphoria and White Lotus 1), and she did a commendable job in the movie about Reality Winner. Of course, now that Anything But You has happened (and I love rom coms!), I kind of have to retract my "will watch anything she stars in" position. To me, the Sweeney brand was initially about absolutely impeccable taste, but people who did not appreciate her HBO shows do not realize this.
chooky
1mo ago
I understand liking the Kamina-centric beginning, but more than the deranged crescendo of stakes in the second half?
chooky
1mo ago
I feel like jokes about political correctness are somewhat peak 1990s... but I'm happy to cede something along the lines of "If we only knew...".
chooky
1mo ago
What are some of these freedoms that an older person might be missing out on?
chooky
1mo ago
I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".
chooky
1mo ago
No, I mean there is a 2-3 bedroom apartment and 2 or even 3 people live in it. Like on Friends!
chooky
1mo ago
Are roommates just not a thing at all anymore, or is anyone with one now undateable? If so, is this because of the current lack of roommate-driven sitcoms starring attractive people a la Friends?
I feel like "housemates" is still pretty dateable, especially in expensive cities.
chooky
1mo ago
Hmm, an obvious failure mode to social conservatism sounds like it would be a state weighed down by elder care, which is not too far off from describing most of the world's advanced economies, and the problem is very much getting worse.
Elsewhere, someone else talked about a marriage needing to be in service of something greater than the marriage. To many social conservatives, it seems like the answer to this is a deity. To me, it seems like you should just be able to make the marriage in service of the children. On an overall societal level, I would criticize both liberals and conservatives as failing to prioritize the future, progeny, etc, and wish there was a way to get this to happen.
chooky
2mo ago
If 50% tariffs have been painless
Most global trade is via ocean freight, which is fairly slow. Domestic supply chains and inventory turnaround time delay the impact further. I would consider most data on final prices to very much still be pre-tariff, especially since headline series like the CPI/PCE are still only through May. The big data tests for the tariffs implemented in April will probably be for June and July data over the coming weeks, but even then the metals tariff increases to 50% didn't take effect until June.
Silksong, from what I can tell, seems to be explicitly designed to avoid much of the power creep of other metroidvanias, including Hollow Knight, hence the paucity of damage and health upgrades. But it may be that I am very dumb - I got through almost all of Hollow Knight before realizing that the nail upgrades even existed. (I do have the first needle upgrade in SS; getting the second seems like it requires quite a bit beyond merely beating Act I, which I have done.)
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