441–450 of 563 posts
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…
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>And it really is as simple as that. It really isn't, because your "simple" comparison is bunk. For one, it's measuring stock vs flow. Stock prices measure stock, eg. the size of a piggy bank. Salaries measure flow, eg. your annual salary. Directly comparing the two results is meaningless. It's easy to demonstrate this with the piggy bank example. If your salary was 50k/year, you saved 5k/year, then your piggy bank w…
Good point. Doubling in 7 years means around 10% growth per year. So, if someone took out 10% of their stock nest-egg per year, it wouldn't have grown at all. Having said that, GP does illustrate Picketty's point in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that r>g, that is return on capital is greater than economic growth, and Picketty did theorise that this would inevitably lead to concentration of wealth (unless war or…
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> But the two largest costs to our finances are ridiculously outsized: Child Care and Health Care. I thought the same thing. We pay 5.5k for two kids per month. But then I looked at the regulations on professional child care. You need one certified worker and 250 sq.ft. of indoor space (in an expensive city) per 4 kids. After professional insurance, healthcare and other ancillary wage costs, there's really not that m…
>We pay 5.5k for two kids per month You can pay a fraction of that if you're ok with you paying cash and then learning Spanish. It won't have any of the administrative/compliance bloat either, if you catch my drift. >the only option would be billions in subsidies.
I also really like that the pros give the strict guarantee of 0 minutes of screen time - both for the kids and the ladies who watch them. I'm going full Luddite for the kids, having a nanny backdooring that effort seems like a bad idea...
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Did you really just compare human beings to wild animals who hibernate?
It was a loose analogy, but it is thought Neanderthals may have hibernated (or gone into a state of torpor). Your comment offers no reasoning nor evidence; is something wrong with it, and if so what, exactly? Food scarcity in winter time is something humans have historically been exposed to and evolved with in much of the world. And clearly over-eating in humans corellates somewhat with food insecurity. Regardless of…
Research has mostly focused on explaining the paradox at a household level. Farrell and colleagues reviewed the literature pertaining to low- and middle-income countries and focused on the bigger picture, that is, analyzing the issue at an individual, household, community, and country level. They proposed 5 context-mechanisms factors that could modify the association between an individual’s food insecurity and obesity risk: affordability of energy dense, processed foods, quantity & diversity of food consumed, spatial temporal access to nutritious food, interpersonal distribution of food and non- dietary behavior. Nevertheless, affordability of energy dense foods was identified as the main mechanism since the authors had limited evidence to support the other mechanisms (26). Other authors have proposed that social support can also play a role since they found that food insecure women who reported lower levels of social support were more likely to be obese (28)
Wage stagnation is the root problem. When costs of all expenses go up over time but paychecks do not, it causes major stress.
I disagree. The root problem that causes high prices of food/housing/healthcare is the lack of supply for food/housing/healthcare. The root problem that causes low supply of food/housing/healthcare is government regulation. There is enormous market incentive to provide more food/housing/healthcare, increase supply, and decrease prices. However, governments have made it difficult or impossible for the market to provid…
For example, 40% of corn in the US goes towards Even in areas that are more builder-friendly, there is still incentive to build denser housing (which is more efficient) that maximizes return per sq ft. So you get studios, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom homes. And larger homes (built outside of onerous zoning areas) that more amenable to raising families end up creating unsustainable costs for local municipalities through sprawl.
Some of these areas can be addressed by a free market but maintaining a healthy market that minimizes perverse incentives requires significant tweaking (i.e. regulations)
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Yeah, I wouldn't consider any HDHP (High-Deductable Healthcare Plan) to be "good insurance".
Au contraire, that is much closer to the definition of insurance. We don't want people to get bankrupt with an unforseen medical issue like cancer. Insurance should cover that. Routine care, including shit that's a little unlucky should be paid for out of pocket. In the US, health care and health insurance have become synonymous such that all the good bits of insurance are out the door and all the bad ones have staye…
Getting a kid is not an accident for most modern people, and should never be seen as an event that could bankrupt anybody.
Hence, deferring to the definition of insurance is futile.
Then again - the US is the only country I know of that insists that health is something you insure.
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Of course it's fair, my criticism isn't with your outcome but with designing an insurance plan to work this way. It's weird to tie your little extra money to your health insurance plan.
That's why it's not the only option. It's a benefit not a restriction. The powers that be saw an opportunity for insurers to cover less and insurees to leverage that into a different benefit. It's all just about shifting risk around and taking a little off the top. It's a nice incremental addition to the existing system. Way more feasible than changing the system.
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(First, I apologise that this message must be hasty, I must do life stuff). I really feel like your first graph proves my point? OK, at times it goes up, at times it goes down. But since 2002 the dividend is the same, but the S&P 500 is 7x. So the lazy capitalist puting in 10 million there in 2002 got 132k in yearly 'income' then, now he gets 925k yearly. You wanna figure out how much average salary increased the sam…
I fully agree. Additionally, stock price is driven also by expectations of further growth, which in order to keep happening, something's gotta give so it must chip away at quality of the final product too (cheaper materials, cheaper manufacturing, etc) with a consequent enshittification. My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made…
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You're omitting some steps here. While "enshittification" probably happens to some extent, it's unhinged to suggest that's the only explanation for growth, as opposed to more mundane explanations like "better technology".
>My parents, who live in Italy, could afford a stone house from the 1800s in their thirties. I live in Canada and everything's made of wood and snot and and costs a fortune.
Seems like a stretch to blame this on "enshittification" when North American houses have been made of wood for centuries.