361–370 of 563 posts
No, no. The US has the strongest GDP! The world's biggest stock market! So. Much. Wealth! How can this be!?
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The megacorp can provide cheap food, it just doesn't want to. In practice they adjust the margins in a data-driven way on individual goods. UK supermarkets actually provide pretty cheap fresh produce, because the market is pretty competitive. I think the most ridiculous I've seen was a 1kg bag of carrots for 20p. Many countries or locations do not have highly competitive supermarkets. Oh, and there's both volume and…
Costco is an interesting one to me. They're widely touted as being cheaper, but most foods there have some sort of upscaling factor -- "organic", some sort of regional variation like "sockeye" salmon instead of farmed atlantic, a few extra steps of processing, etc. Rice, pasta, and fruit are all usually more expensive than other alternatives, even at bigco grocery competitors. You have to be a little careful if that'…
I encourage everyone to do the following simple exercise: look at the main stock market in your country, and see how far back you must go for the main index to be half of what it is today. The answer is probably somewhere between 5 and 7 years. Then find salary statistics, and see how much the average salary has increased in the same time. The answer is probably somewhere between 20 and 30%. And it really is as simpl…
Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages inte…
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Did everyone just forget what it was like before Obamacare? Apparently you didn’t know anyone excluded for pre-existing conditions Obamacare also mandated coverage for basic care like your annual physical and many mental health conditions. It’s not perfect, but I guess it’s been long enough that people are forgetting how bad the situation was before.
> your annual physical ... should not be covered. This is a predictable, moderate expense. You can plan and save for it, or even skip it. An annual physical is of debatable value for a young, healthy person. Insurance is for unpredictable, financially devastating expenses that you cannot avoid. If predictable stuff like annual physicals is covered, the "insurance" is just an inefficient savings account.
I bring this up because in this country our health insurance is broken in every way. We absolutely should be investing in preventative medicine, because doing so would not only have found things like my cousin's situation, but it would also help us ward off both the disease and cost of more chronic illness. Instead most of us dwindle along with very limited access for decades until we either get some condition that forces us into very expensive and time-consuming care, or we end up gutting whatever life savings we might have on our last few months. So is an annual physical really all that big of a deal on the surface? No, but it's emblematic of how broken our approach is to care - to put it in IT terms, we have no monitoring/observability or metrics and we only take action after we've had an incident or breach, and even then we are generally only applying patches not dealing in RCA.
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I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0] If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume. [0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all.
The thing I don't get is farmers markets being more expensive.
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People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. Many are not able to save at all. Those without stock receive only flow. Those with stock receive both flow and stock, and those with more stock profit more from rising stock. So the relationship between stock and “flow” is absolutely relevant if we want to understand wealth inequality, because the working…
> People who have less flow and no stock can increase their savings less than those with stock and the same flow. If they have savings they can buy stock. Nobody is sentenced to have savings only. > with the ownership class accruing profit that they receive by virtue of ownership. Anyone can buy stock with less than $100 and thereby join the ownership class.
And having $100 in savings doesn’t free someone from wage labor.
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If you put a 2.5% annual tax on net worth, that net worth would very rapidly find its way to other countries. Wealthy people would learn to structure their earnings to flow into businesses in other countries to avoid this wealth tax. This would reduce income tax in the United States. I would guess the overall effect would trend toward a net tax loss. If you gave 40 million people an extra $15K per year to spend, the…
The $15k is being transferred from entity A to entity B. Both entities are not spending the $15k so there wouldn't be any effect on inflation. If you printed an extra $15k then that would cause inflation because both entity A and entity B would be spending $15k. Inflation, which means a steady rise in prices overall, happens only when the total money supply in an economy grows. This increase in money, often called "p…
Our health system is so amazingly bad. Even if you have insurance, you roll the dice getting even basic care. Very easy to end up with hundreds or thousands of dollars in bills if your provider codes something wrong or your insurance denies payment. Much less an actual medical issue that requires repeated trips to a specialist, an expensive medication (even generic), or hospitalizations.
On the other hand you can get things like million-dollar organ transplants.
Americans confuse need with 'nice to have' which leads to the "I don't have money for food/rent/hc" problem. You do not need cable tv or home internet. You do not need an iPhone or top end Samsung. There are many mid-range Android phones much cheaper that can add a MVNO phone plan for around $20/mo that has more than enough data for necessary internet. Key word: necessary. OTA HDTV is available to many millions at th…
Americans confuse need with 'nice to have' which leads to the "I don't have money for food/rent/hc" problem. You do not need cable tv or home internet. You do not need an iPhone or top end Samsung. There are many mid-range Android phones much cheaper that can add a MVNO phone plan for around $20/mo that has more than enough data for necessary internet. Key word: necessary. OTA HDTV is available to many millions at th…
This fully explains the rest of your screed against the working class.