(There may need to be a way to distinguish organizations that broadcast political commentary, but that's another matter.)
Oops, missed this. The SCOTUS very clearly pointed out (I think in Citizens United) why they should never go there: the government should never be in the self-serving position of deciding what sort of corporation is "the press". Imaging Trump getting to decide who's "fake news" and banning them from political speech.
Citizens United did not say that a corporation was itself a person. It said that in a narrow context, a corporation is made of people, and these people keep the rights they've always had.
Unless "closely held" means something significant?
Is your Google broken? A closely held corporation, like a partnership, is own by a small group of people who know each other. Contrast a public corporation, which is owned by random strangers. (Legally there's an allowance for a small percentage of shares to be owned by strangers, so a corporation could technically be both, but that's never come up in a first amendment case).
There's no constitutional basis for a group of people united for a political purpose to be denied their rights because of how they pool their money. However, that doesn't describe most large corporations: they clearly exist for commerce, which doesn't look much like a group of people peaceably assembled to petition the government.
The money is not "gone". It was never a big bank vault full of cash. It has always been invested into special US government bonds.
No, it was for some time invested in marketable treasuries. Now it's not.
It was never "your money". Social Security is not a savings plan.
It damn well should be. People should become wealthy.
No, you can not accomplish the same thing with a 401k with "safe" investments. It will not make enough money, because the return on safe investments is terrible.
The return on Social Security is below inflation. You can make about 2% above inflation safely. Far better. You can make about 4% above inflation with a "target retirement date" fund, which have proven themselves well over the past couple of decades.
Regardless, Social Security won't be something you can even subsist on if you're under 50 now, that much is obvious. We need to try something better - something with takes the money away from the sticky fingers of government and makes everyone wealthy.
Well, you're taking it a bit far. No "donations in kind" to be sure, but it comes down to platform vs publishers. Platforms that don't exercise any sort of editorial discretion are fine. If you look at the rule that applies to radio: they must accept ads for all sides in a political race; they're not allowed to be choosy. I think that's a great approach.
So, can a candidate fly on an airline to an event? Only if he buys a ticket. The airline can't fly him for free (unless they fly all candidates for free), and must sell tickets to all candidates. Make sense? Platform vs editorial discretion.
And legally bribe Congress to keep it that way, thanks to the partisan Citizens United ruling.
Urban legend. Citizens United was a bunch of guys who pooled their money to show a film critical of Hillary Clinton (if you've ever wondered why she opposes Citizens United). The SCOTUS ruled that a closely-held corporation was the same as a partnership, and thus the rights of members are preserved.
It said nothing about "corporations are people", nor did it apply to corporations in general.
The interesting question is: should the Washington Post be allowed to run a full-page story attacking Trump? Should Amazon be allowed to pay the Washington Post to run a full-page ad attacking Trump? What's the difference? It's the same guy in charge, either way. It's the same content, either way.
I'd say "no public corporation can engage in politics" and make it that simple. The NYT would need to go private, but it could. And would anyone miss Fox or CNN?
Social Security was not a ponzi scheme, and until it was pilfered and rifled through by Clinton and the gang, had quite a bit of money. They "borrowed" from it, left an IOU that nobody wants to repay, and thus cut it's legs off at the knees. Clinton got to look as if he has a surplus, and all of the other agencies got richer and a chance to float the debt down the river to someone else.
Sadly, Reagan started the theft. Bush continued it. Clinton did most of the looting, to be sure. I think there was a little left that Bush drained dry.
The theft was very subtle, since they substituted one treasury bond for another, but the difference in kind was everything, as they exchanged marketable securities for non-marketable IOUs. It's exactly like borrowing from your 401K: you still technically have value in you 401K, in the form of an IOU to yourself, but that's useless to you in retirement. You have to replace that IOU with new income.
So, yes, it went from a bad investment/pension plan, to directly taxing the young to pay the old. It's perhaps worth pointing out that the old are more wealthy on average than the young, so this is not a progressive tax: it's a money transfer from the less-wealthy to the more-wealthy.
We'd be far better off with a government-regulated 401K with contributions stright from your paycheck (regulated to restrict it to only safe investments, as this is a safety net). It would be a real cultural change to the US, as almost everyone would accumulate wealth in a way they could see. That's the very reason it will never happen: too many politicians depend on the voters seeing themselves as downtrodden.
You can remove the video. Or take more time editing. Using a script helps a lot.
These are not viable substitutes. Let me give you an example: the PBS SpaceTime channel. It's professionally produced and scripted, but they sometimes get their physics wrong, and have it pointed out by the comments.
So what should they do? Ideally, update the video. YouTube doesn't allow that. Replacing the video is entirely useless, as YouTube doesn't have a re-direct. So what they do is acknowledge the error and talk about it in the next video, witch is nice but totally useless if youre not watching them in order. For simple mistakes, they could add an annotation on screen while the mistaken line was being said.
Other similar channels, like Brady Haran's channels, are in interview format with professors. Sometimes mistakes are spotted in editing. There's no time to re-do the interview - that's nuts. Instead they simply use annotations (the errors are usually just the wrong word being said, so the annotation is a perfect fix).
It will shorten many 30 miinute videos where people shout "focus" to a 5 minute one woth actual content.
Yeah, who cares about that garbage. I'm talking about the valuable stuff on YouTube.
As I understand it, ARM is ahead now on raw compute/$. Intel is ahead where it has hardware acceleration that ARM doesn't, or where you have to scale vertically. Java seems faster/$ on ARM processors with Jazelle (which may not apply to the new AWS instance). No clue about.NET Core perf on ARM, though I can't imagine it's great. OTOH, as MS keeps working on Azure ARM instances, I bet it gets a lot better.
So, if you don't need to scale vertically, you care about comput/$ not compute/core, and I can see ARM winning out in the long run. Intel has been stagnant for some time now.
By "DB Load" do you mean "being a DB" or "using a DB"? The later makes no sense. Waiting idle for your query to return results is hardly CPU intensive.
For being a SQL DB, yeah, that obviously doesn't make sense yet. When it does, you can be sure Amazon will offer an ARM server type for Aurora, since they can do all the porting and perf tuning themselves. For being a NoSQL DB, that's always going to be I/O bound. For doing map/reduce, that sure sounds like "a relatively simple load and shoveling data out the door."
That being said, I've been doing backend work for many years, and it's a rare exception when I have anything to do with a SQL DB, and then only on legacy systems. For anything in AWS, I just use DynamoDB and design around its limitations. Who wants to have DBAs these days? Or servers, for that matter (though you're usually stuck with some)?
So, while waiting for the glorious socialist revolution, your plan is to not save? That's stupid plan.
And FWIW, the Stock Market is not safe, just ask any of the victims of various supposedly secure investment companies./quote>
You can also lose all the money you were going to buy a house with due to wire fraud (which is a serious problem in the US right now). That doesn't make "buying your house" an unsafe investment.
Investing in a single company is not safe. Investing in the US economy as a whole is. It's always comes down to "ownership of the means of production". You can wait for the glorious socialist revolution, or you can actually start buying your share of the means of production today.
Most people don't earn enough money to actually provide for retirement on their own.
That's simply not true. It may well be true of the bottom quintile, but not "most people" by a long shot. Most people don't make the needed sacrifices. I don't think that's a matter mostly of some weakness, though most of us struggle with deferred gratification, but of lack of cultural awareness. How to invest? When to Start? We don't learn these things growing up.
my grandfather supported 12 kids bought a house and bought a new car off the lot every 3 years till the 80's on a factory income. What changed is employers stopped paying in line with increases in inflation
What changed is: those factories went out of business. GM, Chysler, most steel in the US, bankruptcies across the board. Mostly due to pension costs.
tend to get involved in things that harm their bottom line, like expect them to not dump industrial waste into the water supply.
When's the last time the US lit a river on fire? That sort of thing has gotten better over the decades, not worse.
The lord can make you tumble The lord can make you turn The lord can make you overflow But the lord can't make you burn
Burn on, big river, burn on Burn on, big river, burn on
Surprisingly that was just 50 years ago, but it was shocking then, not expected as it was 120 years ago.
They could never cover anything but the video itself. Not link to "subscribe".
At least in my browser, the volume controls - all the controls - are inside the video area, and can be covered by annotation rectangles. And they can do "click here to subscribe" links without warning. Dark UX patterns.
Household expenses don't scale linearly. This is why "households" are a thing: it's advantageous for a family to pool its resources.
Not saying it's easy to save at these income levels. It requires hard sacrifices. E.g., it's easy to dismiss "status symbols" as unneeded, but that can be a big deal for your kid in high school. It takes discipline and practice to prioritize your spending such that you can live with the result, and it's harder still to do that for 2.
It's hard, but people do hard things all the time, and it's easier with support and cultural backing. The generation that lived through the Great Depression had these habits, but it has gradually faded from our culture.
The were abused badly. Hidden rectangles that covered e.g. the volume control tht linked to "subscribe", for example. This is why we can't have nice things.
Which sucks, because YouTube has no good way to edit a video once posted (much like Slashdot), so annotations were the one way you could correct a stupid mistake after the fact, by popping up a correction as you said the stupid thing.
Median household income in the US is around $44K per year.
FYI: In 2016 it was $59,039, exceeding any previous year, per the US Census. I don't think we have the 2017 numbers yet.
Tariffs will solve no problem that currently exists in manufacturing. They will not bring manufacturing jobs to the US (actually the opposite is what will happen) and they will not force China to play nice.
Tariffs are not the end goal. Elimination of unbalanced tariffs is the goal - China has some draconian tariffs on import of US goods. Maybe this play will work, maybe it won't but it's a valid attempt.
But, unless you're swimming in money relative to your needs, a stock allocation lower than 50% is just a horrible idea.
If you have a way to decide when the market is low, and draw from bonds when the market is low and from stocks when it's fine, you can get by with a low bond percentage. Some would argue that if you can do that, you're already a billionaire, but I think you can. But it's an active approach where you're aware of the market. To just blindly take out $X/month, you come out ahead wit lower yields and lower volatility. In short, your lifetime value is yield over volatility^2 once you start drawing down.
Stuffing a dollar under your mattress in 1920 and pulling it out in 1965, it has lost roughly half it's value. Stuff a dollar under your mattress in 1965 and take it out in 2010, it has lost 85% of its value.
Guess when we went off the gold standard? Trick question; we actually went off the gold standard under FDR when he made it illegal for Americans to own gold, so that they couldn't redeem the notes that the government was no longer actually backing with gold (this is a thing that actually happened). But we admitted we were no longer on the gold standard in the 60s.
The standard savings vehicle for most Americans for a long time was a savings account at a bank. It kept up with and exceeded inflation in many cases netting very modest but real gains. Now they must gamble on the stock market with their money to stay above inflation, despite record low inflation rates for much of the early part of this decade.
Beyond a few month's savings for emergency, loaning money to banks is just a bad plan. A savings account has never been a way to stay ahead of inflation - that's not what it's for. Ownership of the means of production, via some broad-based index fund, takes the purchasing power of the dollar out of the picture. Year-by-year the stock market is effectively random, but over multiple decades it's dependable. It gets harder when you near retirement, as you need bonds (though own your house outright by then), but at that point you'll have something worth talking to a financial advisor about.
So you're against "civilization"? Every man/woman/child for themselves?
No need to work together to raise a barn or build a freeway?
Nothing outside of your control will ever happen to anyone, and if it does, oh well, sucks to be them?
Taking care of everyone is a laudable aspiration. It's worth remembering, however, that "you" are part of "everyone". Start with your own financial responsibility. Sadly, that will put you above the average in the US. Then how about your family's?
Those are things you can actually fix. They're within your power, much as they can be difficult. Maybe when you've demonstrated that you can do it, that you actually understand the sacrifice needed, and the investment decisions, and how to pursuade your own family to defer gratification, maybe then you'll be the right person to tell strangers how to do the same.
Charity begins at home, but if you're doing well you'll have the resources to give to others. To be the generous one offering his own resources to help, not the sad sack saying "other people who are not me should totally care for the poor".
"Someone else should pay for my retirement because that's more civilized" is perhaps a nice sentiment. I'm not so sure you have any inborn claim on the labors of others, but it sounds nice and all. What it's not is a retirement plan. What it's not is a plan to provide a house for your family. What it's not is a plan to keep providing a house for your family when your suddenly laid off, or your wife needs cancer treatment.
Sentiment is great, but also have a plan. Those very things outside your control are coming, never doubt it. What's inside your control is to prepare for them, as best you can.
This is more important than youmake it out to be. The key to these games is that you have to make a map to succeed. That's not the kind of learning you get from "machine learning", as obvious as it might be to a human player.
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world. It's no accident that the neurological seat of human intelligence is an addition to our massive vision processing wetware - understanding the world in terms of objects precedes self awareness in the only example we can study. "AI" doesn't work that way, at least for the most part.
I find it impressive that someone has managed to connect the idea of making a map with the internals of machine learning (which are completely arbitrary matrices that have no obvious connection to the result).
When you basically double the number of workers, don't expect wages to increase.
I think you've got that wrong. What we can consume as a nation is more-or-less what we can produce as a nation. If twice as many people work, we should end up with twice as many goods and services. And our standard of living has gone up far more than 2x since the 50s.
One person working will buy far more now than in the 50s, it's just that it's less than what we've become accustomed to in the past 60-odd years.
Also, people waste tons of money on gadgets that they didn't have in 1960.
Sure, but we also expect medical care based on an MRI instead of guesswork, and a car that has seatbelts and won't slide off the road in the rain, and a house with more rooms than people, and so on. Most of the difference in expense isn't frivolous stuff, it's important stuff. But we do get more.
Slashdot Mirror
(There may need to be a way to distinguish organizations that broadcast political commentary, but that's another matter.)
Oops, missed this. The SCOTUS very clearly pointed out (I think in Citizens United) why they should never go there: the government should never be in the self-serving position of deciding what sort of corporation is "the press". Imaging Trump getting to decide who's "fake news" and banning them from political speech.
Citizens United did not say that a corporation was itself a person. It said that in a narrow context, a corporation is made of people, and these people keep the rights they've always had.
Unless "closely held" means something significant?
Is your Google broken? A closely held corporation, like a partnership, is own by a small group of people who know each other. Contrast a public corporation, which is owned by random strangers. (Legally there's an allowance for a small percentage of shares to be owned by strangers, so a corporation could technically be both, but that's never come up in a first amendment case).
There's no constitutional basis for a group of people united for a political purpose to be denied their rights because of how they pool their money. However, that doesn't describe most large corporations: they clearly exist for commerce, which doesn't look much like a group of people peaceably assembled to petition the government.
The money is not "gone". It was never a big bank vault full of cash. It has always been invested into special US government bonds.
No, it was for some time invested in marketable treasuries. Now it's not.
It was never "your money". Social Security is not a savings plan.
It damn well should be. People should become wealthy.
No, you can not accomplish the same thing with a 401k with "safe" investments. It will not make enough money, because the return on safe investments is terrible.
The return on Social Security is below inflation. You can make about 2% above inflation safely. Far better. You can make about 4% above inflation with a "target retirement date" fund, which have proven themselves well over the past couple of decades.
Regardless, Social Security won't be something you can even subsist on if you're under 50 now, that much is obvious. We need to try something better - something with takes the money away from the sticky fingers of government and makes everyone wealthy.
Well, you're taking it a bit far. No "donations in kind" to be sure, but it comes down to platform vs publishers. Platforms that don't exercise any sort of editorial discretion are fine. If you look at the rule that applies to radio: they must accept ads for all sides in a political race; they're not allowed to be choosy. I think that's a great approach.
So, can a candidate fly on an airline to an event? Only if he buys a ticket. The airline can't fly him for free (unless they fly all candidates for free), and must sell tickets to all candidates. Make sense? Platform vs editorial discretion.
And legally bribe Congress to keep it that way, thanks to the partisan Citizens United ruling.
Urban legend. Citizens United was a bunch of guys who pooled their money to show a film critical of Hillary Clinton (if you've ever wondered why she opposes Citizens United). The SCOTUS ruled that a closely-held corporation was the same as a partnership, and thus the rights of members are preserved.
It said nothing about "corporations are people", nor did it apply to corporations in general.
The interesting question is: should the Washington Post be allowed to run a full-page story attacking Trump? Should Amazon be allowed to pay the Washington Post to run a full-page ad attacking Trump? What's the difference? It's the same guy in charge, either way. It's the same content, either way.
I'd say "no public corporation can engage in politics" and make it that simple. The NYT would need to go private, but it could. And would anyone miss Fox or CNN?
Social Security was not a ponzi scheme, and until it was pilfered and rifled through by Clinton and the gang, had quite a bit of money. They "borrowed" from it, left an IOU that nobody wants to repay, and thus cut it's legs off at the knees. Clinton got to look as if he has a surplus, and all of the other agencies got richer and a chance to float the debt down the river to someone else.
Sadly, Reagan started the theft. Bush continued it. Clinton did most of the looting, to be sure. I think there was a little left that Bush drained dry.
The theft was very subtle, since they substituted one treasury bond for another, but the difference in kind was everything, as they exchanged marketable securities for non-marketable IOUs. It's exactly like borrowing from your 401K: you still technically have value in you 401K, in the form of an IOU to yourself, but that's useless to you in retirement. You have to replace that IOU with new income.
So, yes, it went from a bad investment/pension plan, to directly taxing the young to pay the old. It's perhaps worth pointing out that the old are more wealthy on average than the young, so this is not a progressive tax: it's a money transfer from the less-wealthy to the more-wealthy.
We'd be far better off with a government-regulated 401K with contributions stright from your paycheck (regulated to restrict it to only safe investments, as this is a safety net). It would be a real cultural change to the US, as almost everyone would accumulate wealth in a way they could see. That's the very reason it will never happen: too many politicians depend on the voters seeing themselves as downtrodden.
"Millions of voters" is propaganda. Dozens of voters is reality.
You can remove the video. Or take more time editing. Using a script helps a lot.
These are not viable substitutes. Let me give you an example: the PBS SpaceTime channel. It's professionally produced and scripted, but they sometimes get their physics wrong, and have it pointed out by the comments.
So what should they do? Ideally, update the video. YouTube doesn't allow that. Replacing the video is entirely useless, as YouTube doesn't have a re-direct. So what they do is acknowledge the error and talk about it in the next video, witch is nice but totally useless if youre not watching them in order. For simple mistakes, they could add an annotation on screen while the mistaken line was being said.
Other similar channels, like Brady Haran's channels, are in interview format with professors. Sometimes mistakes are spotted in editing. There's no time to re-do the interview - that's nuts. Instead they simply use annotations (the errors are usually just the wrong word being said, so the annotation is a perfect fix).
It will shorten many 30 miinute videos where people shout "focus" to a 5 minute one woth actual content.
Yeah, who cares about that garbage. I'm talking about the valuable stuff on YouTube.
As I understand it, ARM is ahead now on raw compute/$. Intel is ahead where it has hardware acceleration that ARM doesn't, or where you have to scale vertically. Java seems faster/$ on ARM processors with Jazelle (which may not apply to the new AWS instance). No clue about .NET Core perf on ARM, though I can't imagine it's great. OTOH, as MS keeps working on Azure ARM instances, I bet it gets a lot better.
So, if you don't need to scale vertically, you care about comput/$ not compute/core, and I can see ARM winning out in the long run. Intel has been stagnant for some time now.
By "DB Load" do you mean "being a DB" or "using a DB"? The later makes no sense. Waiting idle for your query to return results is hardly CPU intensive.
For being a SQL DB, yeah, that obviously doesn't make sense yet. When it does, you can be sure Amazon will offer an ARM server type for Aurora, since they can do all the porting and perf tuning themselves. For being a NoSQL DB, that's always going to be I/O bound. For doing map/reduce, that sure sounds like "a relatively simple load and shoveling data out the door."
That being said, I've been doing backend work for many years, and it's a rare exception when I have anything to do with a SQL DB, and then only on legacy systems. For anything in AWS, I just use DynamoDB and design around its limitations. Who wants to have DBAs these days? Or servers, for that matter (though you're usually stuck with some)?
So, while waiting for the glorious socialist revolution, your plan is to not save? That's stupid plan.
And FWIW, the Stock Market is not safe, just ask any of the victims of various supposedly secure investment companies./quote>
You can also lose all the money you were going to buy a house with due to wire fraud (which is a serious problem in the US right now). That doesn't make "buying your house" an unsafe investment.
Investing in a single company is not safe. Investing in the US economy as a whole is. It's always comes down to "ownership of the means of production". You can wait for the glorious socialist revolution, or you can actually start buying your share of the means of production today.
Most people don't earn enough money to actually provide for retirement on their own.
That's simply not true. It may well be true of the bottom quintile, but not "most people" by a long shot. Most people don't make the needed sacrifices. I don't think that's a matter mostly of some weakness, though most of us struggle with deferred gratification, but of lack of cultural awareness. How to invest? When to Start? We don't learn these things growing up.
my grandfather supported 12 kids bought a house and bought a new car off the lot every 3 years till the 80's on a factory income. What changed is employers stopped paying in line with increases in inflation
What changed is: those factories went out of business. GM, Chysler, most steel in the US, bankruptcies across the board. Mostly due to pension costs.
tend to get involved in things that harm their bottom line, like expect them to not dump industrial waste into the water supply.
When's the last time the US lit a river on fire? That sort of thing has gotten better over the decades, not worse.
The lord can make you tumble
The lord can make you turn
The lord can make you overflow
But the lord can't make you burn
Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Surprisingly that was just 50 years ago, but it was shocking then, not expected as it was 120 years ago.
I've had annotations turned off in user settings for years.
They could never cover anything but the video itself. Not link to "subscribe".
At least in my browser, the volume controls - all the controls - are inside the video area, and can be covered by annotation rectangles. And they can do "click here to subscribe" links without warning. Dark UX patterns.
Household expenses don't scale linearly. This is why "households" are a thing: it's advantageous for a family to pool its resources.
Not saying it's easy to save at these income levels. It requires hard sacrifices. E.g., it's easy to dismiss "status symbols" as unneeded, but that can be a big deal for your kid in high school. It takes discipline and practice to prioritize your spending such that you can live with the result, and it's harder still to do that for 2.
It's hard, but people do hard things all the time, and it's easier with support and cultural backing. The generation that lived through the Great Depression had these habits, but it has gradually faded from our culture.
The were abused badly. Hidden rectangles that covered e.g. the volume control tht linked to "subscribe", for example. This is why we can't have nice things.
Which sucks, because YouTube has no good way to edit a video once posted (much like Slashdot), so annotations were the one way you could correct a stupid mistake after the fact, by popping up a correction as you said the stupid thing.
Single you can save a lot on $30k, IMO.
This sounds lovely until you realize that the majority of the population is working low-wage jobs where saving for retirement is impossible.
Median household income is just under $60k. You can save a lot on that.
Median household income in the US is around $44K per year.
FYI: In 2016 it was $59,039, exceeding any previous year, per the US Census. I don't think we have the 2017 numbers yet.
Tariffs will solve no problem that currently exists in manufacturing. They will not bring manufacturing jobs to the US (actually the opposite is what will happen) and they will not force China to play nice.
Tariffs are not the end goal. Elimination of unbalanced tariffs is the goal - China has some draconian tariffs on import of US goods. Maybe this play will work, maybe it won't but it's a valid attempt.
Take the time to understand the math behind Merton's portfolio problem.. Interestingly, this is a solved mathematical problem, if you can give your utility curve. Basically, volatility sucks when you need money every month. For the same reason that dollar cost averaging is awesome when you're first investing, withdrawing a fixed amount every month from a volatile source is a terrible idea.
But, unless you're swimming in money relative to your needs, a stock allocation lower than 50% is just a horrible idea.
If you have a way to decide when the market is low, and draw from bonds when the market is low and from stocks when it's fine, you can get by with a low bond percentage. Some would argue that if you can do that, you're already a billionaire, but I think you can. But it's an active approach where you're aware of the market. To just blindly take out $X/month, you come out ahead wit lower yields and lower volatility. In short, your lifetime value is yield over volatility^2 once you start drawing down.
Stuffing a dollar under your mattress in 1920 and pulling it out in 1965, it has lost roughly half it's value. Stuff a dollar under your mattress in 1965 and take it out in 2010, it has lost 85% of its value.
Guess when we went off the gold standard? Trick question; we actually went off the gold standard under FDR when he made it illegal for Americans to own gold, so that they couldn't redeem the notes that the government was no longer actually backing with gold (this is a thing that actually happened). But we admitted we were no longer on the gold standard in the 60s.
The standard savings vehicle for most Americans for a long time was a savings account at a bank. It kept up with and exceeded inflation in many cases netting very modest but real gains. Now they must gamble on the stock market with their money to stay above inflation, despite record low inflation rates for much of the early part of this decade.
Beyond a few month's savings for emergency, loaning money to banks is just a bad plan. A savings account has never been a way to stay ahead of inflation - that's not what it's for. Ownership of the means of production, via some broad-based index fund, takes the purchasing power of the dollar out of the picture. Year-by-year the stock market is effectively random, but over multiple decades it's dependable. It gets harder when you near retirement, as you need bonds (though own your house outright by then), but at that point you'll have something worth talking to a financial advisor about.
So you're against "civilization"? Every man/woman/child for themselves?
No need to work together to raise a barn or build a freeway?
Nothing outside of your control will ever happen to anyone, and if it does, oh well, sucks to be them?
Taking care of everyone is a laudable aspiration. It's worth remembering, however, that "you" are part of "everyone". Start with your own financial responsibility. Sadly, that will put you above the average in the US. Then how about your family's?
Those are things you can actually fix. They're within your power, much as they can be difficult. Maybe when you've demonstrated that you can do it, that you actually understand the sacrifice needed, and the investment decisions, and how to pursuade your own family to defer gratification, maybe then you'll be the right person to tell strangers how to do the same.
Charity begins at home, but if you're doing well you'll have the resources to give to others. To be the generous one offering his own resources to help, not the sad sack saying "other people who are not me should totally care for the poor".
"Someone else should pay for my retirement because that's more civilized" is perhaps a nice sentiment. I'm not so sure you have any inborn claim on the labors of others, but it sounds nice and all. What it's not is a retirement plan. What it's not is a plan to provide a house for your family. What it's not is a plan to keep providing a house for your family when your suddenly laid off, or your wife needs cancer treatment.
Sentiment is great, but also have a plan. Those very things outside your control are coming, never doubt it. What's inside your control is to prepare for them, as best you can.
This is more important than youmake it out to be. The key to these games is that you have to make a map to succeed. That's not the kind of learning you get from "machine learning", as obvious as it might be to a human player.
One of the many ways that AI is nothing like intelligence is the absence of any representational model of the real world. It's no accident that the neurological seat of human intelligence is an addition to our massive vision processing wetware - understanding the world in terms of objects precedes self awareness in the only example we can study. "AI" doesn't work that way, at least for the most part.
I find it impressive that someone has managed to connect the idea of making a map with the internals of machine learning (which are completely arbitrary matrices that have no obvious connection to the result).
Women entered the workforce.
When you basically double the number of workers, don't expect wages to increase.
I think you've got that wrong. What we can consume as a nation is more-or-less what we can produce as a nation. If twice as many people work, we should end up with twice as many goods and services. And our standard of living has gone up far more than 2x since the 50s.
One person working will buy far more now than in the 50s, it's just that it's less than what we've become accustomed to in the past 60-odd years.
Also, people waste tons of money on gadgets that they didn't have in 1960.
Sure, but we also expect medical care based on an MRI instead of guesswork, and a car that has seatbelts and won't slide off the road in the rain, and a house with more rooms than people, and so on. Most of the difference in expense isn't frivolous stuff, it's important stuff. But we do get more.