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Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

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Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#461

Post by lelanthran »

ikrenji wrote: post #206
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example AMD and NVDA revenue up 50%+, income 100%+ Eventually these high margins will attract competitors and bring down the margins For those examples that is false hope. You can't just spring up a new competitor in the GPU filed out of thin air and expect it to work; Nvidia and AMD duopolies are so far ahead into the game experience wise that no startup could ever catch up no matter how much money you throw at…

intel is literally getting into the GPU market 2022

> intel is literally getting into the GPU market 2022

Haven't they always been in the GPU market? Sure, they don't compete on top-end GPUs, but almost all their previous builtin/onboard GPUs:

a) Shipped more than NVidia or AMD

b) Were performant enough to satisfy 90%+ or PC or laptop owners.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#462

Post by zucker42 »

silisili wrote: post #58

As someone who does OK, but lives in reality (not the bay area), I feel a revolution coming. I hope it's not a violent one, but who knows at this point. Hopefully it's just a politician with big policy changes. People feel completely disenfranchised. You keep hanging housing over their head but just out of reach like some baby toy, then inflation spikes everything else. What's the point of working even? I don't know…

I don't think the conditions are close to a large scale revolution in the U.S., especially if you mean a violent revolution. First, there is not a high level of discord in society. Upheavals in the 70s were much more significant than those now. Second, most people blame one or the other political party for our problems, rather than the established order generally, making it more likely people will fight within the bounds of the existing political system.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#463

Post by bosie »

baron816 wrote: post #84
Supermancho wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that math work? > If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest. That is flat wrong. Even if you were still making 23$ an hour as you did in the 70's: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-... https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/ ...you'd still be among the top 20% of earners across the earth. Let's take another step do…

Also, your cherry picked date range has a complex story behind it. It’s a story of falling inequality, not rising inequality. Chinese workers (among others) ate our lunch…by climbing out of abject poverty. They’ve become much more competitive and have seen their real wages skyrocket. If semi-skilled American workers were making $23/hr and equivalent Chinese workers were making $.23/hr (idk making something up), and n…

For one of the two countries the answer is yes...

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#464

Post by kamaal »

fareesh wrote: post #380
kamaal wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>As someone who does OK, but lives in reality (not the bay area), I feel a revolution coming. As some one who lives in India, where inflation is perennially high. I can assure you revolution is not coming, in fact not even a protest march. Revolutions needs a lot of hunger and suffering, its not things like milk going from being $9 to $12 a unit. The common man delays things like fighting for almost as long as they…

Culturally, the average person here in India is absolutely clueless about what freedom is. The idea of small government is non-existent in the minds of people. Based on hundreds of conversations with my red state friends, attitudes are very different. You may be right, but the comparison is missing many key details.

People who are obese enough to not take take stairs but elevators cant fight revolutions by definition.

That is why they have elections, and one way or other democracy fixes most of these problems. Even if the fix is not perfect, or entirely acceptable to everyone.

Revolutions are just totally a different thing altogether and you need way more than milk and egg prices going up, or your favorite politician not getting elected to happen.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#465

Post by kilroy123 »

guerrilla wrote: post #394
kilroy123 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have the correct answer as to 'why' this has happened and what the root cause is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY&t=33s

Can you summarize? I don't want to watch this entire video right now even though it seems interesting.

Democracy relies on people being able to vote for what they think is right; with privacy.

We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich.

See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where they voted and had committees in private, to out in the open.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#466

Post by deadbunny »

prepend wrote: post #446
deadbunny wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Maps, and the ability to read them. > Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Phones, you know good old land lines > Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud? > The ability to learn almost anything for free? Have ya heard of libraries? Does technology make these more convenien…

Have you traveled using maps and GPS? They are very different, and not even comparable. It seems to me like comparing a shovel to a ditch digging machine. It is possible to navigate using maps. But not practical for the mass audience of GPS who can’t use maps. And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types). Technology is a multiplier that increases the returns on things my removing labor and letting…

Am I in some kind of weird HN bubble where no-one has ever used a physical map?

I've travelled extensively pre-turn by turn navigation using physical maps, i spent a year motorcycling across mainland Europe in my early 20's using nothing but physical maps, I did the same but in the US during the early-mid 2000's.

Was it as easy as sticking a zip code into a magic box and having it tell me where to go and when to take a turn? Probably not. But it wasn't much more complicated because I know how to read maps and can remember things for more than 10 seconds.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#467

Post by guerrilla »

kilroy123 wrote: post #465
guerrilla wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you summarize? I don't want to watch this entire video right now even though it seems interesting.

Democracy relies on people being able to vote for what they think is right; with privacy. We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich. See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where…

Interesting but I don't think that privacy would help since those buying the legislation would know they're not getting what they're paying for and deal with that fact in some other way.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#468

Post by Jenk »

sseagull wrote: post #448
Jenk wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm caught in a (philosophical?) dillemna though: I don't want the right to rise to power because I fear for the future of freedom, but I would be repressing freedom by ostracising/excluding the right from electoral eligibility. Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case? .. and on continues the shower tho…

This is the paradox of tolerance. A truly tolerant society would tolerate intolerance, which makes the society not truly tolerant anymore. So a society would need to be a bit intolerant to stamp out intolerance, making it overall more tolerant.

I do hope that, and believe society should strive for, the utopian ideal of education that is plentiful enough it would make the need to be intolerant (of intolerance) redundant. I understand it might be immature/naive to expect that "if only they understood the facts, they would change their mind!" but one can dream.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#469

Post by dhruval »

markvdb wrote: post #451
dan-robertson wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An internet connected smartphone is not equivalent to the postal service (plus a pay phone or landline I guess). It may be that you use a computer or something else for the things that most people use smartphones for, wand so don’t realise how much they cover. You also didn’t mention having to go to the library (distance + fuel/car/travel costs + more time) for information, finding jobs from newspaper advertisements…

Poverty is not just about absolute purchasing power adjusted for location and time. There is also very much an unspoken social context, sometimes even codified into law. In 1970, obviously nobody expected you to own a smartphone because it didn't exist. Noone had access to such a thing. Not so in 2021 western Europe. The example very much holds in that sense. You could fully participate in society without that expens…

Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game)

The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.

Can apply this to any technological advance. So for eg. in the 1800s no one expected you to own a car. So the invention and subsequent technology driven deflation of car prices didn’t make everyone’s lives better.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#470

Post by 1cvmask »

Gareth321 wrote: post #250

Real wages have been flat since the 1970s ( https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us... ). "Okay, so people's living standards are about the same since 1970?" Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in…

Housing supply (NIMBYism by landlords) has not kept up with population growth and immigration in most dense cities. There is also the massive increase in multiple houses bought and left empty by the rich which are ghost houses. Healthcare will go up because that is regulated by politicians who do their best to raise prices for vested interests. The 2003 law passed by Republicans to prevent the government from even negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma is an example. You can’t even do parallel imports of drugs from say Europe. The number of doctors is restricted by the AMA and they even do the guidelines on how well they should be compensated. Educatlon is a third party payment “scam” where there is no incentive to restrict your costs, and there is every incentive to spend money on non-academic activities like massively bloated football programs and bureaucracies.

We reap what we sow.

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