141–150 of 370 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you consider middle class? That term is notoriously ill-defined.
- $50-$99 is lower middle - $100-$199 is middle - $200-$499 is upper middle - $500-$999 is lower upper Etc. That’s the scale I’ve always used (household income). Most millennials fall in the lower middle or middle bucket.
It's such a shame that the state can't support the education system financially, so that 20-year old people wouldn't have to take loans to study. It works in other countries, so why not in the US?
It's a deliberate program.
When a new market opens up, like say the internet in the 90s, then the investors and the people in charge will allow some of us to be overpaid for a while.
It's really not out of the goodness of their heart's. At that point they are focusing on market capture, and they need bodies to help them do that.
Eventually they find a way to make that market 'efficient' (read bad for everyone employed in it) and unless a new market opens up, it can be really bad for workers.
I can't think of a significant new market that's been opened up since the app bubble of 2010 or so.
H1B compete with the newly graduated college students. Before people say that there’s no problem with STEM graduates finding a job, I’ll counter that many of my coworkers 20 years ago didn’t have STEM degrees, and were previously English majors, business majors, etc. They were people with technical aptitude who realized they had picked a field of study that didn’t quite suit their financial aspirations. They were abl…
How do you know that? I doubt this claim. Plenty of people still teach themselves programming and get jobs.
H1B compete with the newly graduated college students. Before people say that there’s no problem with STEM graduates finding a job, I’ll counter that many of my coworkers 20 years ago didn’t have STEM degrees, and were previously English majors, business majors, etc. They were people with technical aptitude who realized they had picked a field of study that didn’t quite suit their financial aspirations. They were abl…
Plenty of H1B holders create jobs as well. The economy isn't a pie of fixed size with everyone fighting over a limited number of slices. Overall, immigration has been a net boon to the US's economy, including the creation of many jobs.
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If the dealer is buying at 80% and selling at 110% of some number then surely that means that number is not actually fair market value?
Even the stock-market has a bid-ask spread. A perfectly efficient market will push the bids higher and the asks lower. Stocks for example only have a spread of a couple of pennies. As the markets get less and less efficient, you become more reliant on middle-men to perform transactions. In the dark ages, people would pay 1-pound of gold for 1-pound of salt. In the case of modern society: bonds (and other derivatives)…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you consider middle class? That term is notoriously ill-defined.
- $50-$99 is lower middle - $100-$199 is middle - $200-$499 is upper middle - $500-$999 is lower upper Etc. That’s the scale I’ve always used (household income). Most millennials fall in the lower middle or middle bucket.
- 61% of incomes are below lower middle
- 26% of incomes are lower middle (median being $61,822)
- 10% of incomes are middle
- 3% (nearly) of incomes are upper-middle
- Data from https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Caveat, this is individual income, and you're talking about household income, so not quite the same for couples where both work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can absolutely confirm this. I have done work (not on this particular type of system, however) for many small-to-medium car dealerships, and they will spend roughly $400 to equip many of the vehicles in their inventory with ignition interlocks that can be disabled remotely. Here is their business cycle: 1. Purchase a used car from a customer for 80% of "fair market value." 2. Sell the car on a $0-down, 7-year note…
Is it possible to disable these systems, or is something baked into the car where if you disable it the car won't run? This seems very suspicious unless the auto dealer/contractor is expecting most people to not even bother with the gps system.
It's wired directly into the ignition system. Despite having a computer engineering degree and enough experience to be reasonably confident in my ability to analyze unknown electronic systems, I spent a lot of time very carefully going through all of the connections to convince myself I wasn't going to brick my vehicle by removing the device. In the end it was pretty easy to yank the device. The hardest part was patching the ignition wire, which had been cut to install the device.
Conclusion from the previous paragraph? It's not that hard if you know what you're doing, but I'd bet that something like 99% of people wouldn't have a clue how to remove it even if they noticed it was there at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years ago was a special time. Anyone who could spell HTML could get a job. Things are different now and the bar is a bit higher. Today’s equivalent of the English and business majors are boot camp grads.
The bar is higher because there's free (or near free) specialized education overseas and not domestically. Why pay to train entry level employers when the tax payers of X country will do it for you for free? Take away the subsidized labor pool and watch that bar fall back to the floor.
Uh not really.
I've been a front-end developer for almost ten years. When I first started out, yeah, you could teach a monkey to build a static site. Most of the jQuery I knew was copy and paste, easy stuff.
Now? You need to be an expert in Javascript, Object Oriented programming, CSS preprocessors, NPM and various build tools, template languages, responsive frameworks and at least another dozen or so technologies people are using to create dynamic websites. This doesn't even scratch the surface of what you need to know if you're interested in developing mobile apps.
Web designers don't have it much easier. You need to be completely fluent with every Adobe tool and Apple Sketch or any collection of wireframing software. Toss in deep knowledge of font pairings, color theory and you need to have expert level knowledge of CSS. You're not a "web designer" anymore either. You're now a UI/UX developer.
And did I mention that every single one of these technologies come and go faster than mumble rappers on Soundcloud? So once you've taken a year or so to learn BackboneJS, poof then Angular and ReactJS comes out, and now you have to pivot to those languages. Oh, you're company loved Angular but the new guys like ReactJS? Oh too bad, now we're going to use React instead. Oh you just interviewed for a new role, but they're in love with VueJS, do you know that too?
The bar is higher because development in general has become exponentially more complex and continues to get more complex every month. Specialized Education overseas really has nothing to do with it. At the rate technology is changing on the front-end side, there's just no way education can keep up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you consider middle class? That term is notoriously ill-defined.
- $50-$99 is lower middle - $100-$199 is middle - $200-$499 is upper middle - $500-$999 is lower upper Etc. That’s the scale I’ve always used (household income). Most millennials fall in the lower middle or middle bucket.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Your lower-upper class is a subset of the top 1% of incomes.
https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-pe...