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If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

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Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#641

Post by stringfood »

tock wrote: post #223
xyzelement wrote: post #75

I feel like this is an easily answerable question, but I can see this because I grew up an atheist (and travel in those typically atheist/educated/professional circles) and have become much more aware/educated in/embracing of religion later in life myself. If you compare apples to apples - say my average atheist friend who is a director in a FAANG and also my religious friend who is also a director in the same FAANG.…

Counterpoint: I know plenty of very religious families with multiple kids who are deeply unhappy. In my experience friends and family are the primary contributor to happiness. Provided they are good people. Else its a train wreck. It doesn't matter if they are religious or not.

I also know many religious families who have disowned their kids for being gay - it is not a one way street of great benefits. Let alone the mental gymnastics required to claim to know the creator of the universe

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#642

Post by jofla_net »

oooyay wrote: post #369
cvoss wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Ar…

I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my fa…

Food deserts too, i was surprised to learn.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#643

Post by roncesvalles »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #609
tzs wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In constant dollars cars are actually pretty much the same as they were 40+ years ago when you compare similar types and trim levels. A new Honda Civic for example costs about the same when you take into account inflation as the Civic I bought in 1989. The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger per…

You've got the cause and effect backwards here. The average purchase price of a car in constant dollars is about double now because those are the only cars to purchase and the only group that can afford those cars are those who are affluent. In general the people who purchase new vehicles ironically are not the ones who own them. They consistently purchase new vehicles at a regular cadence. The existence of some base…

>because those are the only cars to purchase and the only group that can afford those cars are those who are affluent

What is the basis for you to assume this and not, for example, the fact that people simply spend a bigger percentage of their earnings on cars now?

You can definitely buy the base model Civic that you see online. It was only during COVID that you couldn't due to inventory shortages.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#644

Post by maxerickson »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #473
bontaq wrote: post #409

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the mi…

I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you. Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social…

Staying as healthy as you can is the best strategy with perfect healthcare too.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#645

Post by stringfood »

xyzelement wrote: post #237
lpcvoid wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion has nice side effects (community), but vast downsides (non-scientific worldview, brainwashing). I think you can get the community feeling also by simply meeting with people you know, in hackerspaces for instance.

"non-scientific worldview" I find this an oft repeated meme. The men to whom we own our scientific understanding were all deeply religious (not just lived in a time when everyone went to church) For example - Darwin had trained to be an Anglican vikar prior to his journey on the Beagle and wrote to his future wife letters full of discussion of divinity. Newton was obviously deeply religious and wrote more about relig…

Religion is fundamentally against scientific ideas because it presents a bunch of frankly unlikely ideas and then says we cannot test them. Christ rising from the dead cannot be tested and it lives outside of science. Also a lot of religious people in past have poined to Bible as reasons for why sceientific ideas like heliocentrism were correct and it ended up being completley wrong! You are cherry picking the few examples were Religion actually helped science when most of the time it was fought every revelation. Also 90% of people were religious back in the day that doesn't mean 90% of all inventions have religion to thank for it. The fact is that many religions are not testable and though they bring tremendous happiness to its users are not true.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#646

Post by [deleted] »

RickS wrote: post #639
whatisthiseven wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link a source for gen z with higher homeowner rates than millennial, st the same age? Because redfin shows that just is very clearly not true https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...

That chart is comparing point in present time, not point in generation-relative time. IE zoomers at ~25 mills at ~40. If you were to approximately age sync the red and yellow lines on that chart, by moving their start dates to the same point, the red line is higher.

[deleted]

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#647

Post by nozzlegear »

orwin wrote: post #551
joaogui1 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe their justification is on the first sentence > That sort of stuff causes pitchforks to rise up in other countries. (Not that I agree)

Your countrymen applauded putting chains on foreign workers that were told by their company to build a factory in your country. Your union representative were giddy. You absolutely deserve corpo-speak, that's the least you deserve.

I'm sure you can find some exceptions, but I don't remember anyone who celebrated that or thought it was remotely good policy. Assuming you're talking about the Hyundai plant in Georgia.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#648

Post by momoschili »

jcranmer wrote: post #478
bontaq wrote: post #409

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the mi…

> Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Unfortunately this is using BLS data that captures largely urban areas and fails to account for a large and quickly growing segment of the workforce that also tend to be lower earners - self-employment (eg uber drivers, doordash, gig working, contractors). This is definitely an over-estimate of real wages, a best case scenario of sorts.

With the backdrop of it coming from the organization that is supposedly supposed to be managing inflation... :P

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#649

Post by tempaccount5050 »

tech_ken wrote: post #632
Aurornis wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford. > Pay's less. Less than the narrow window of…

> Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic. Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper? edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent h…

From what I understand, yes. My 24 year old coworker makes $65k/year and has a $2200/mo mortgage. It's an old starter home in the Midwest, nothing fancy. It stresses him out to the point of not going to a happy hour once in a while unless there's a buy one get one deal or something or I offer to buy (which I do happily). No vacations, no eating out, no fun. It's super sad to see. He talks about being in his prime but being unable to enjoy it at all.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#650

Post by maxerickson »

Lammy wrote: post #521
randomNumber7 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money should only have the purpose of realizing ones goals, it has no purpose in itself. The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.

It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/d…

This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.
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