• 7 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle






  • First, full time wages isn’t how median income is calculated. It’s simply taxable income, could be from capital gains, inheritance, working part time etc.

    If we switch to full time employee, are we ignoring shiftwork? Counting it as full time if they have enough hours? (Which really starts to skew when you think about the service industry where a bartender or server walks out with a few hundred for a few hours hard work.)

    But let’s just ignore all that, pretend everyone is on a 40 hour a week job. Even so, again at the low end you still run into oddities that really warp the statistics. When I was 16 - 21 I had a full time job as a camp counsellor but a large part of my wages were what’s called “in kind” wherein they covered my food and board. When I was in school, I worked security and made minimum wage but with the understanding I could do my schoolwork (in essence, another type of in-kind pay) so I took that over a better paying job. Similarly, you might have apprentice or entry wages. Or as above, a program that gets special needs folks a job eith a willing employer where some of the wage is shared by the government or goes to paying the costs associated with employing that person. (Consider these programs from the employer’s perspective, if the employer was paying the same wage regardless, why would they hire someone with challenges etc when they could hire someone who wouldn’t require accomodations.) Again, all of this stuff happens at the very bottom and really isn’t a good indicator of the economy.

    If you did large bottom swathes, bottom 10/20 % you’d still have some of these issues but they’d get smoothed out a little bit.







  • I think you’ve got most of it pretty well outlined here. A couple minor additions/thoughts:

    Lemmys communist leanings are probably self reinforcing. If you’re a moderate/mainstream leftie but think communism is a but silly, well noting so will get you “yelled at” by those disproportionately loud voices. It gets tiring, so I imagine the mainstream/moderates learn to avoid communism adjacent threads/questions etc.

    There also may be an age thing. I have less time and inclination to argue with randoms online than when I was younger. And when I was younger I had much more extreme (and in retrospect some embarrassing) views.




  • Very little as I disagree with the things continuing on.

    We made it through the Cold War, but as any student of history will note, barely.

    This has, I think, given us a false sense of confidence and it’s like the drunk driver who claims that because they survived last night they will do so again tonight.

    I don’t 100% know things will go wrong but I do know that many different countries are A) pursuing nuclear weapons B) entering very politically unstable times and C) are just about to start hitting serious consequences as a result of climate change.

    America went from the richest country in the world to the richest country in the world, freaked out and elected trump. How crazy will other, nuclear armed, countries get when food and water become serious issues?

    There’s of course a good chance we pull through, drunk drivers tend to survive or the issue would’ve self corrected long ago. But I dislike being forced to participate in a global game of Russian roulette.



  • Weight training can be super dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily do significant damage to your back or knees doing fairly basic exercises like a deadlift or squat incorrectly.

    Especially as weight training is increasingly encouraged for the elderly, personal training seems a fairly reasonable job. Admittedly, like any other job, there are folks who provide little to no value (think of the teachers just waiting to collect their pensions) but that’s not to say it can’t be a super useful industry.