111–120 of 421 posts
Wealth is a stock measure, income is flow. You accumulate wealth out of what you can set aside out of the flow. Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation. Then, when we sort of "make it" here, people who…
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I think this is an excellent comment. What makes me very sad is that during the past 14 months the divide between those who own assets and those who don't has reached gargantuan proportions. I mean, in my raging inferno of a housing market, over the past couple of years home prices have easily doubled. So a 400k house from 2018 now sells for 800k. Yes, if I want to move to another house in my area I'll pay similarly…
People made vastly more money just sitting around in their houses in the past couple years than I made in my job as an "essential" worker over the past decade. This is not an accident. It’s a result of deliberate policy choices. The incumbent homeowners voted themselves massive returns. And they felt self righteous while they were doing it to boot.
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a national politician needs two homes - one in the capital and one in the location they represent. That alone would eat up 6000€ especially if either place is expensive.
why do they need to own the place in the capital, if they only travel there to work? Can't they rent for the duration of the time they spend there?
Of course you can not assume that everybody could be equally rich, and only their choices are to blame if they are not. But the other extreme, that people are just born to be poor no matter what choices they make, is equally silly.
What if the "I have no choice" mindest of poor people is partly to blame for their predicament?
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I think this is an excellent comment. What makes me very sad is that during the past 14 months the divide between those who own assets and those who don't has reached gargantuan proportions. I mean, in my raging inferno of a housing market, over the past couple of years home prices have easily doubled. So a 400k house from 2018 now sells for 800k. Yes, if I want to move to another house in my area I'll pay similarly…
The solution is to move to an area with cheaper housing. Moving to opportunity is the American way
At the same time (as seen on HN recently) they're "giving away" land in small-town Kansas and Nebraska.
No jobs. You are responsibly for building the house. Lots of other caveats.
I think a real-estate collapse or a sustained wave of affordable housing starts is more likely.
I had a co-worker who thought he had a typical american childhood because he didn't consider his family wealthy, even though they had millions of dollars of networth over 30 years ago. Him and his 3 bothers went to a very exclusive private school that was 50k a year per child, but since his classmates were mostly "old money" that were from family worth 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, he was picked on for being th…
Fast food gives me the runs too and I don’t have that association. McDonalds, Taco Bell, Chic Fil A. I can eat at Super Duper just fine, though. Doctors aren’t infallible.
I agree that there are rich people who know little about what it's like to be poor or even middle class. But not all rich people were always rich. I grew up poor, and was poor as a young adult. After working 2 jobs, going to school and trying to keep my family together on next to nothing, I was able to climb my way up and get to "middle class". Despite being poor for a while, my kids were happy and they didn't know a…
Personally I think it’s all bullshit and you have people of all types on both ends. It’s orthogonal.
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One summer in high school I got a factory job. It was Michigan, so I was running an injection molding press making the rims for side mirrors. (Decades later I still remember that the press took 67 seconds per cycle, and that 1600 rims was the shift target.) I was on second shift, so my crew didn't see the executives much. But one day the CEO held an all-hands, so we shut all the machinery down and went to an area big…
O/T - How many side mirror rims were in each cycle? If it were just one, then your shifts must have been over a day long, which doesn't make much sense.
I agree that there are rich people who know little about what it's like to be poor or even middle class. But not all rich people were always rich. I grew up poor, and was poor as a young adult. After working 2 jobs, going to school and trying to keep my family together on next to nothing, I was able to climb my way up and get to "middle class". Despite being poor for a while, my kids were happy and they didn't know a…
> I also met some wealthy people who didn't talk like that...I learned that some actually earned their way there. They grew up poor, worked hard, went to school, worked harder, had some luck by being in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills, and eventually became wealthy. I have to ask, but how many of these people have had the mindset that "X is poor because they're not working hard enough"…
The rich who had it handed to them likely wouldn't even have a thought like that cross their minds. It's more like "Oh... huh, poor people? Yeah, I don't know. What's poor?"
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No, fast food is actually just disgusting lab-made pseudo-food, if you’re accustomed to fresh, whole, real food. I loved fast food growing up, but after a couple year stint eating only fresh foods, I went back and literally couldn’t stomach it anymore. It tastes good going down. (At the time) I had no conditioning or preconceived beliefs that it was disgusting, but within an hour my stomach felt queasy and I threw it…
Be that as it may, he wouldn't get sick when he didn't think he was eating fast food. We'd go to a diner for breakfast sometimes, and since he perceived it as a nice family-run place, he wouldn't get sick, even though their food was still processed garbage that showed up frozen in a truck every morning.