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30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

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Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#31

Post by starik36 »

The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one.

I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.

Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#32

Post by SimianSci »

qaq wrote: post #21
SimianSci wrote: post #15

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enc…

Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?

No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship. What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.

A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#33

Post by ryandrake »

SimianSci wrote: post #15

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enc…

Yea, wealth seems invisible because we peasants aren't even let into the places where these wealthy people roam. They live in an entirely different world than us, and they invest heavily in that world's function.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#35

Post by doctorwho42 »

delichon wrote: post #16
jmclnx wrote: post #7

To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then

I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.

Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more!

Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??!

Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?!

Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess...

But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#36

Post by qaq »

conception wrote: post #27
qaq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?

https://www.dcfpi.org/all/how-wealthy-households-use-a-buy-b... Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!

Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#37

Post by accrual »

joe_the_user wrote: post #22
treis wrote: post #12

It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative. I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there…

I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile. Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhou…

> illustration of how self-insulating people are

I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#38

Post by jerlam »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #18
SimianSci wrote: post #15

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enc…

I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actual…

The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.

Re: 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

#40

Post by mlsu »

reactordev wrote: post #6

Two words: “subscription fees” It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.

No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition.

It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation.

Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.

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