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One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

bbc.com

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Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#511

Post by dan-robertson »

c7THEC2DDFVV2V wrote: post #500
ac2u wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah if you're on that rate and not dumping every penny you can into your pension allowance each year (and using up any unused allowance for previous three years), you're crazy.

whats crazy is forcing people to save for something they have no guarantee of seeing. Giving the pension age keeps increasing a pension is nothing more than paying into a pot you will never be able to fully use. Especially given how people are taxed on their pension payments.

To be fair, the amount people are forced(?) to put into pensions from employment income is pretty tiny and there are tax-advantages savings accounts which people can use instead of pensions, up to a limit. There are also limits on incentives for pension contributions.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#512

Post by dan-robertson »

b3kart wrote: post #506
trgdr wrote: post #505

As an American expat in London, I think the thing that consistently shocks me is how neither Brits nor Americans understand how much poorer Brits are than Americans. The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable. And as much as I love that the NHS is a thing, it's not a reasonable comparison. No o…

Dubious evidence for rather strong claims. > The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable. Couldn't be bothered to verify the numbers, but even if they're true: you've compared London to New York. The vast majority of Brits and Americans don't live in these two cities. I'd argue that these two ci…

US: Real median household income was $70,784 in 2021, not statistically different from the 2020 estimate of $71,186 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). [1]

UK: Median household disposable income in the UK was £32,300 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2022, a decrease of 0.6% from FYE 2021, based on estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Finances Survey. [2]

I think the GP’s claims are true (the UK is poorer and many people don’t realise it). It used to be a bit less obvious when GBP was strong so you needed to look at things like PPP (or like, how good the tumble driers are) to see the difference.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#513

Post by EddieEngineers »

mustacheemperor wrote: post #423
EddieEngineers wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only place that has guanciale and decent pancetta near me, plus they sell pasta from my in-laws village in Italy, which is fun to cook carbonara with from time to time. They also sell wagyu which is hard to find in the Bay Area! I absolutely would never ever do my actual weekly shopping from there!

Speaking as someone who spent an hour last week fruitlessly looking for pancetta that wasn't factory packaged in plastic, you raise a good point!

Check it out! It's really quite good - comes in a proper slab you cube yourself. They also have some pretty nice American Wagyu steaks around the $30 mark which I've been using for yakiniku parties (thinly cut and cooked on a grill in the middle of the table)! As long as you want something semi-specialist they're great but general items like chicken breasts or broccoli are just mental.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#514

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #418
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

45% probably includes retirement contributions.

No, it doesn't. 45% is the top marginal rate, no-one in the UK includes "retirement contributions" as part of taxation...it makes no sense.

No, it doesn't, but people love to show a big difference between gross and net and forget to mention retirement moneys.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#515

Post by 908B64B197 »

xzel wrote: post #271
CydeWeys wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an outlier though, no? The overall averages there are much lower. Also everyone I know in tech over here is making much more than that still.

That thats the case for the US as well. The average salary for US software dev, according to glassdoor, is 88,395/year, which iirc is about the same I've seen form other sources. Everyone working in FAAG is an outlier compared to the rest of the US. These conversations are usually pretty poor because context is very important and job + location + circumstance is seemingly pretty much impossible to compare to each oth…

To be fair, the average salary for hospital worker is quite different than the average salary for neurosurgeon. Yet both work in healthcare at a hospital.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#516

Post by sieongioetnio »

vkou wrote: post #225
wskinner wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top marginal rate of 45% in the UK starts at £125,140. Compare that to the US, where the top marginal rate of 37% starts at $578,125. - Edited to correct incorrect US top rate.

In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125k GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer's portion)[1], and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer's portion). Added to the rest of their marginal tax rate, they'd be seeing a rate of 22 + 15.3 = 37.3%. Of course, they won't actually get health insurance for it, which…

>It does get you 11 carrier fleet strike groups, and 5,500 nuclear weapons, though.

The majority of government spending is on social services. Defense is usually under 20% of the budget.

These are 2022 numbers, so a bit out of whack from Covid-19, but they get the point across. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The problem in the U.S. is inefficiency. The U.S. spends more public money per capita on healthcare than most of its peers. Simply nationalizing the healthcare system would quite possibly lead to lower taxes, and would certainly lead to much lower healthcare spending. We know how to make a system that provides for everyone and we know it will save us money, but we can't do it because that would be SOCIALIST!!!

There's no need to slash the defense budget to make the U.S. government function better. All we need to do is jettison the ideologues deliberately sabotaging good government at every turn.

(I do support slashing defense budgets, but that has nothing to do with saving money. I'd support lighting the money on fire rather than spending it on "national security".)

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#517

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #470
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a while when I was trying to find a job trying to comes to terms with that "average dev salary" number, since the vast majority of jobs for an entry level position were at least 80k, with plenty being more (I was looking nationwide, wanted to move out, didn't care where). I think it's heavily biased by the fact that the field is growing at an extremely fast rate relative to others, which means the average sof…

HN's conception of software developer is just very different from the labor bureau. Someone who makes wordpress sites, knows a little html, css, and teensy amount of javascript is a software developer. These folks do not actually earn a great wage because they know less than what many bootcamp grads come out of a 12 week program with, but they exist in multitudes.

Yeah, this seems to be a stronger contender. The median income for someone with a CS bachelors in the US is $110,417, which is a much more believable number for what I would consider a software developer.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#518

Post by fsckboy »

jerojero wrote: post #466
fsckboy wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when your employer pays your wages, they have an incentive to report that to the govt as a cost so they don't pay tax on it. That gives the govt the information they need to come after you for not paying your income tax on it. So, same thing, income tax and VAT there is more enforceability because he structure of payments and information flow can make a difference to ease of enforcement... but the amount of tax is ba…

I'm not sure I follow your logic to say sales taxes are not regressive. And I don't think a strawman is the right argument for it. It is regressive and it's clearly so because someone living, for example off minimum wage, will have no money (or very little money left) by the end of the month for savings or investment. Where has all this money go? It's gone to pay for goods and services. This isn't just for minimum wa…

flat income tax: if you earn more, you pay more tax, but it's still the same percentage, so "earn twice as much, pay twice as much tax"

progressive income tax: if you earn more, you pay more, but also a higher percentage, so something like "earn twice as much, pay three times as much"

sales tax: spend twice as much, pay twice as much, a flat tax.

it's not regressive, it's flat. "progressive" doesn't mean the political tendency, it means the tax rate progresses higher with income. A "politically progressive" sales tax, you might say, would change the tax rate on the basis of total spend, but difficult to implement because it can't be properly calculated at purchase time, unless you just want to make more expensive items have higher taxes, but you'd lose the tax efficiency described above for the VAT.

now, it's not necessary to bend our thinking like a pretzel to try to make sales tax include an extra bonus for low income people (or extra burden for rich people) but why not just do that as part of progressive personal income tax?† and as discussed, fix sales tax with VAT... which we should simply call company income tax because that's what it is.

† capital gains tax is interesting to discuss but not here, except to say "don't try to fix your problems with capital gains tax rates by making the sales, income, or VAT taxes crazy"

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#519

Post by mnkmnk »

dorkwood wrote: post #509
drumhead wrote: post #16

If you only ever use your phone then there's no point in paying for broadband. I think a lot of people have been taking a look at their subscriptions and cancelling things which they seldom use. Do you really need a sub for a 500mbit connection when you use you phone? You can always cancel it and switch to a much cheaper slower connection or just use you allowance. I had a Disney+ sub which I hardly used so I cancell…

I had that plan when I moved to the US, until I found out that T-Mobile blocks you from tethering to your phone.

It should be illegal to restrict tethering or charging differently for tethering. There are really no technical reasons for a phone to even convey whether it is using the data or sharing data using a hotspot. It is purely for price gouging. I also hate that even unlocked phones don’t have a way to stop the provider from knowing whether tethering is being used or not.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#520

Post by asdff »

yootyootr wrote: post #496
asdff wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you even pay in the UK for a 5 guys hamburger? the previous comment had a complicated order. For reference, in southern california, the regular hamburger is $10.79 from five guys. A lot higher than in n out, a double double is less than $5, but probably $2-3 cheaper than what you'd pay at a low key sit down restaurant like a brewery or whatever.

The Walthamstow (North London) Five Guys is selling the regular hamburger right now for £8.65 which in dollars is $10.75.

Out of curiosity I just checked Detroit, MI, median income of 20k usd a year. Still about the same at $10.49. This is almost bewildering how the price is pegged to about $10.75 the world over, no matter the price of labor or rent or beef or getting it to the world over. Margins must be all over the place.
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