It absolutely should be illegal to force other people to eat and drink things they don't want to eat and drink.
Oh wait that already is illegal.
Banning smoking in public places is like that. It's about keeping you from forcing your drugs on OTHER PEOPLE by putting them into the common air we all have to breath. It's not about your own health. You can kill yourself as quickly as you damn well please, nobody else gives a fuck, just keep your death-sticks to yourself.
You can have cronyism in a socialist context, and the cronyism is not thereby any better, though it becomes thereby not socialist. That is, cronyism is not against the spirit of capitalism -- though it is against the spirit of a free market -- it just makes capitalism even worse than it already was. Cronyism can still happen in an otherwise socialist system, but it goes against the spirit of socialism, and makes the system less socialist. You could argue that state socialism (which is not the only kind of socialism) is maybe more vulnerable to cronyism than a free market would be, and I wouldn't argue against that. Then again the same argument could be made against state capitalism as well.
"Crony capitalism" is still a kind of capitalism, it's just not a free market.
Also this isn't crony capitalism because this isn't business leaders cozying up personally to government officials to get their businesses special privileges, this is just businesses taking advantage of a general government policy enacted by no particular government official that applies to all businesses the same. This is just state capitalism, the collusion of the state with the capital owners. (Crony capitalism is a kind of state capitalism, but this is a more abstract kind than that).
And how do they do that? Through their control of capital. So the distribution of capital is distorting the market and making it less than free, which is what capitalism is. The fact that it's using the state to do so just makes it state capitalism, or corporatism -- better known as fascism.
Cronyism is a different (also bad) thing altogether.
Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
I wish I still had mod points because this is one of the most insightful things I've read on Slashdot in a while.
It especially resonates with me because it closely echoes the core principle of my philosophical system, which is the joint rejection of both nihilism and fideism, because they are both tantamount to different ways of giving up and not even trying (to find answers to whatever kind of question is at hand): nihilism by saying there's no hope because success is impossible (so there's no point trying), fideism by saying there's nothing to be done because success is already at hand (so there's still no point trying because theres nothing more to try for).
Likewise, as you point out, alarmism lets the alarmist say it's hopeless and give up and not do anything, while denialism lets the denialist say there's no problem and nothing to be done and so also not do anything. Only by rejecting both will anyone ever actually get off their ass and do anything.
It's a two-way street, actually. Extraverts don't just siphon the good stuff away from everyone around them; they also dump their bad stuff on everyone around them.
An introvert makes his own good and deals with his own bad and neither siphons nor dumps on everyone else.
Actually it was a psychologist named John Money in 1950 who decided that "man" and "woman" refer to social categories rather than biological ones, and that "male" and "female" do refer to the biological categories, and that is the standard of language used in discussing gender to this day.
Because the minimum wage is a law enforced upon you and your competitors, your competitors' costs go up as well, meaning their prices have to go up too (or they go out of business), meaning there is less competitive pressure forcing you to keep your prices low or else lose sales, and so you don't necessarily lose sales by raising your prices in response to the minimum wage. The overall market price of your product goes up.
Which in general would mean that demand for it would also go down, which isn't necessarily bad for you but would be a social ill as fewer people could afford the product... except the available money to your customer base (who are also employees or someone, now making more from the minimum wage increase) has gone up too, so they can afford it at the higher price.
The only people who lose are the people who make more than minimum wage, whose costs go up without a commensurate increase in income... except that other wages do generally increase in response to minimum wage increases, but not uniformly across the board, rather in proportion to their distance from minimum wage; someone making $15/hr now is much more likely to see a wage increase in response to the minimum wage going up to that than someone already making $50/hr is.
So the overall effect of the minimum wage increase is to increase net costs for the few people at the very top and decrease net costs (i.e. increase net income) for the many people at the very bottom, which means that on the whole more people have more money to spend, increasing economic activity, increasing overall wealth, and of course increasing the wellbeing of the vast majority of people, at a barely noticeable expense to a few people who can really afford not to care that the top (they're still at) isn't quite as far from the bottom as it used to be.
For starters, it would be literally impossible to give a basic income of $5000/mo in the United States. That's about 120% of the GDP per capita, which means that you would have to take 120% of the GDP in taxes just for the basic income, which of course is not possible because you can't take more money than there is, even if there were no other taxes at all and we were completely redistributing all income. Even in that just-mentioned scenario, which is still patently absurd, the absolute most you could give in a basic income, while shutting down the entire rest of government and making everyone's income exactly equal, would be around $4000/mo.
Probably the most that anyone would possibly accept -- and the figure I think would be ideal, but I don't expect to see -- would be about half of the mean income, or about $2000/mo, which incidentally is also around the median income, meaning that under such a scheme nobody would fall below what's currently the 50th percentile of incomes. A much more likely scenario is something more like a quarter of the mean income, or around $1000/mo, which is close to what existing welfare programs like SSI currently pay, which would mean nobody would make less than half of what's presently the median income, which is barely livable in many places, and just above the poverty line (and, incidentally, also happens to be around the mode income right now, where the most people's income falls).
That all said: all you're doing is shuffling around the money, not adding in new money, and in any sane way of doing it (pay x% of the mean income and fund it with a flat x% tax) it wouldn't even change the ordering of who's richer, or the qualitative shape of the curve; it just scales the curve on the y-axis, centered on the value of the mean income. That means that some people at the very top are less able to to afford the highest rents (and $2000/mo is barely affordable by someone barely in the top 20% of incomes), and those prices would come down in consequence. And yes, the prices of the cheaper places would likely come up too, for the reasons you give; more demand, no change in supply. (Although supply does change in response to demand, and this would lead to more lower-cost housing being built instead of more higher-cost housing, which would also be a benefit). But as a result, the difference between a cheap place and an expensive place is lower, and the difference in effective incomes between the poor people living in the cheap places and the rich people living in the expensive places is smaller, which means that it is easier to change, by your other life choices, whether or not you can afford the expensive place. And that is the whole point of this exercise, to make moving from poor to rich (or vice versa) less a matter of scaling (or falling off) a sheer cliff, and more a matter of climbing up (or down) some stairs. The slope from poor to rich, as represented on a graph of income distributions, is literally less steep, and so figuratively much easier to climb.
If you have a choice between two shit sandwiches, but one of them is dried, grass-fed cow shit, and the other is a hot steaming pile of HIV-positive human shit, it's absolutely true that they're both shit and you'd be best off eating neither, but it's even more clear which one you should choose if you have no choice but to eat one or the other.
He's not a liar. He's worse. He's a bullshitter. As elaborated in one of my favorite philosophical works, On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that a liar knows and cares what is true and false and is deliberately trying to make people believe things that are false; while a bullshitter couldn't care less whether the things he's saying are true or false, so long as people believe what it is useful to him that they believe. If that should happen to be true, how convenient, and if not, no loss, because the bullshitter never cared to begin with.
A properly implemented basic income basically does nothing more than rescale the vertical axis of of an income distribution curve, centered on the mean income. A basic income of around, say, $1000/mo, would be around 25% of the mean income. To fund that and remain revenue neutral would thus require a 25% additional income tax (which would be more than offset by the basic income it's paying for for the vast majority of people). Those together have the effect of moving every point on a graph of income distribution to 75% of its previous distance (on the y-axis) from the mean income's position (on the y-axis). The total amount of money in the economy remains the same, the lineup of who is richer than who remains the same, the qualitative shape of the income curve remains the same, it just gets a little squished vertically. You didn't suddenly print a bunch of free money, you just shuffled it around a little bit. Why would that cause rampant inflation? Some people have more money to spend, sure, and others have a little less. The amount of money in circulation is the same. Whence the inflation?
How are people supposed to get independent of their parents if they can't get the income they need to be independent of them until they are independent of them?
What about people who are students and don't have parents that they can be dependent on, working their way through school? Do they get the money they need to survive, or the lower student income? Do the first group above (people struggling to get independent of their parents) have to go through a barely-surviving stage like this before you start paying them enough to survive?
What about working people who go back to school to try to get training to get better, higher-paying jobs? Do you cut their pay while they're doing that?
the fact that until you find a job that exceeds that you get no benefit
This is not true, or shouldn't be and doesn't need to be true.
Let's say we set the basic income to 50% the mean wage (which would be about $25k/year basic income, or a little over $2k/mo), and fund it by a 50% tax on all incomes (which is more than offset by the basic income for about 75% of the populace who currently fall below that mean income). A homeless with no income thus suddenly has a free income of about $2k/mo. But every nominal dollar they earn on top of that, they still get to keep 50 cents of it. If they get a full time minimum wage job, that amounts to over $600/mo extra. If they get a full time median-wage job (around $25k), that amounts to around $1000/mo extra. On top of the basic income. By the time they're working a full-time mean-wage job (around $50k), they're making twice as much as the basic income, after basic income and the taxes they pay to fund it are factored in (and the basic income and the taxes they pay to fund it exactly cancel out in that case). And even at that point, there is still motive to continue working; if they make twice that again, they're still going to end up with yet another extra $1000/mo or so (compared to the mean income) after taxes and basic income are accounted for.
If you were to make the basic income something more like $1000/mo, which is barely enough to survive off of in many places (that's slightly more than what my destitute mother's SSI pays), or about 25% the mean income (or half the median income), and fund that with a 25% additional income tax, then instead people would be able to keep 75 cents out of every dollar they earn, on top of their basic income.
In any case, you'd have to set the basic income up in some kind of pants-on-head retarded way (like the way current welfare payments like SSI are set up) in order for it to not pay off to work unless you can get a job paying more than the basic income pays. Any sane way of doing it would provide incentive to work more at any income level. Yes, even the people making a millions per year: if the choice is between doing something that beings in another million of which you get to keep half or three-quarters or whatever, or not doing that and getting nothing at all, which do you think people are going to choose?
There being so few people rich enough to do anything with their ideas and so many poor people consequently beholden to those rich people is bad.
If the money actually flowed from the idle rich to the hardworking poor then the problem would solve itself, but it seems somehow (*coughrentandinterestcough*) the money always ends up flowing right back into the hands of the rich to spend over and over again ad infinitum, and never actually accrues in the hands of the poor who are nominally being paid it.
I mean, when did burger flipping become a "real job" instead of something teens did in high school?
When jobs on that pay scale became the only kinds of jobs that an enormous fraction of the populous can get (and having a job working for someone else became necessary for survival because everything everywhere is owned by someone else so you either work for whoever will hire you or die).
I think he's saying that Trump does 'retard hands' as a way of mocking people in general, not specifically this one disabled person. Which would seem plausibly in character for him, though not especially better than doing it just in this one case. I've asked GP to provide an example to confirm if that is true.
First off, "fake news" doesn't mean what you're using it to mean here. Editorial, spin, distortion, or misinterpretation of real events to score political points is not "fake news". Deliberately making up complete fabrications out of whole cloth, knowing (on the part of the creator) that they are fake, and trying to get other people to believe it, is what "fake news" means.
Second, I'd like to see an example of Trump mocking an able-bodied person in the same way as he mocked the disabled person in question. (It seems plausible that he maybe does 'retard hands' like that as a way of mocking people in general, which still is not great on his part, but I'd like to know for the record whether that's really the case or not).
I can see where it comes from easily. You try appealing to someone's reason and it fails. You try appealing to someone's empathy and it fails. You're arguing against a closed-minded heartless brick wall of an opponent; you're not really going to convince them of anything, in any way, because their purpose in life is to disagree with you no matter what. So the best you can do is hope to dissuade others from falling in with their same lot, and one way to do that is to just publicly look down on the opponent, snub them, make them seem like the uncool kid who nobody wants to be like. So you get smug. Your opponent is an obvious moron and you publicly can't see any reason why anyone with two brain cells to rub together would so much as give them the time of day. They're not even worth listening to. Hopefully, if you give off that air, people won't listen to them, and won't fall into the trap out of which they can't be reasoned. Of course if someone asks what makes them so uncool, you still give reasons, but the default before that conversation happens is just an air of them not even being worth talking about.
Time travelers already learned their lesson with Hitler. With no Trump presidency, there's no WWIII, and the technology that leads to time travel never gets invented, so using time travel to prevent America from getting trumped is pointless because paradox. Just like with Hitler and WWII, so since we already learned our lesson about how futile such things are there, none of us bother trying to run face first into paradox over Trump. Sad.
If you're invested in index funds, as you should be, the performance of your investment tracks the performance of the overall market, so if things bounce back in a week, it doesn't matter to you if a bunch of inefficiently human-managed mutual funds lost a bunch of money in that dip, the market is back up so so are your indexed investments and you're still doing just fine.
$100k household income is about 200% the median household income, so that not the best choice for "middle class". (It is around the mean household income, but some 75% of Americans are below the mean. Then again, real middle class status based on rent and interest expenses vs unearned incomes is large unattainable to even that 75% percentile, so maybe that's not such a bad choice, somewhere between the "like most people" and "actually capital-neutral" senses of "middle class").
Or maybe most people are shit, or you're stuck in a context where most people are shit and you can't escape it to one where people are generally better...
Slashdot Mirror
It absolutely should be illegal to force other people to eat and drink things they don't want to eat and drink.
Oh wait that already is illegal.
Banning smoking in public places is like that. It's about keeping you from forcing your drugs on OTHER PEOPLE by putting them into the common air we all have to breath. It's not about your own health. You can kill yourself as quickly as you damn well please, nobody else gives a fuck, just keep your death-sticks to yourself.
You can have cronyism in a socialist context, and the cronyism is not thereby any better, though it becomes thereby not socialist. That is, cronyism is not against the spirit of capitalism -- though it is against the spirit of a free market -- it just makes capitalism even worse than it already was. Cronyism can still happen in an otherwise socialist system, but it goes against the spirit of socialism, and makes the system less socialist. You could argue that state socialism (which is not the only kind of socialism) is maybe more vulnerable to cronyism than a free market would be, and I wouldn't argue against that. Then again the same argument could be made against state capitalism as well.
"Crony capitalism" is still a kind of capitalism, it's just not a free market.
Also this isn't crony capitalism because this isn't business leaders cozying up personally to government officials to get their businesses special privileges, this is just businesses taking advantage of a general government policy enacted by no particular government official that applies to all businesses the same. This is just state capitalism, the collusion of the state with the capital owners. (Crony capitalism is a kind of state capitalism, but this is a more abstract kind than that).
And how do they do that? Through their control of capital. So the distribution of capital is distorting the market and making it less than free, which is what capitalism is. The fact that it's using the state to do so just makes it state capitalism, or corporatism -- better known as fascism.
Cronyism is a different (also bad) thing altogether.
Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
I wish I still had mod points because this is one of the most insightful things I've read on Slashdot in a while.
It especially resonates with me because it closely echoes the core principle of my philosophical system, which is the joint rejection of both nihilism and fideism, because they are both tantamount to different ways of giving up and not even trying (to find answers to whatever kind of question is at hand): nihilism by saying there's no hope because success is impossible (so there's no point trying), fideism by saying there's nothing to be done because success is already at hand (so there's still no point trying because theres nothing more to try for).
Likewise, as you point out, alarmism lets the alarmist say it's hopeless and give up and not do anything, while denialism lets the denialist say there's no problem and nothing to be done and so also not do anything. Only by rejecting both will anyone ever actually get off their ass and do anything.
It's not a free market. It's most definitely capitalism. They're not the same thing.
It's a two-way street, actually. Extraverts don't just siphon the good stuff away from everyone around them; they also dump their bad stuff on everyone around them.
An introvert makes his own good and deals with his own bad and neither siphons nor dumps on everyone else.
No, just literate.
Actually it was a psychologist named John Money in 1950 who decided that "man" and "woman" refer to social categories rather than biological ones, and that "male" and "female" do refer to the biological categories, and that is the standard of language used in discussing gender to this day.
Because the minimum wage is a law enforced upon you and your competitors, your competitors' costs go up as well, meaning their prices have to go up too (or they go out of business), meaning there is less competitive pressure forcing you to keep your prices low or else lose sales, and so you don't necessarily lose sales by raising your prices in response to the minimum wage. The overall market price of your product goes up.
Which in general would mean that demand for it would also go down, which isn't necessarily bad for you but would be a social ill as fewer people could afford the product... except the available money to your customer base (who are also employees or someone, now making more from the minimum wage increase) has gone up too, so they can afford it at the higher price.
The only people who lose are the people who make more than minimum wage, whose costs go up without a commensurate increase in income... except that other wages do generally increase in response to minimum wage increases, but not uniformly across the board, rather in proportion to their distance from minimum wage; someone making $15/hr now is much more likely to see a wage increase in response to the minimum wage going up to that than someone already making $50/hr is.
So the overall effect of the minimum wage increase is to increase net costs for the few people at the very top and decrease net costs (i.e. increase net income) for the many people at the very bottom, which means that on the whole more people have more money to spend, increasing economic activity, increasing overall wealth, and of course increasing the wellbeing of the vast majority of people, at a barely noticeable expense to a few people who can really afford not to care that the top (they're still at) isn't quite as far from the bottom as it used to be.
For starters, it would be literally impossible to give a basic income of $5000/mo in the United States. That's about 120% of the GDP per capita, which means that you would have to take 120% of the GDP in taxes just for the basic income, which of course is not possible because you can't take more money than there is, even if there were no other taxes at all and we were completely redistributing all income. Even in that just-mentioned scenario, which is still patently absurd, the absolute most you could give in a basic income, while shutting down the entire rest of government and making everyone's income exactly equal, would be around $4000/mo.
Probably the most that anyone would possibly accept -- and the figure I think would be ideal, but I don't expect to see -- would be about half of the mean income, or about $2000/mo, which incidentally is also around the median income, meaning that under such a scheme nobody would fall below what's currently the 50th percentile of incomes. A much more likely scenario is something more like a quarter of the mean income, or around $1000/mo, which is close to what existing welfare programs like SSI currently pay, which would mean nobody would make less than half of what's presently the median income, which is barely livable in many places, and just above the poverty line (and, incidentally, also happens to be around the mode income right now, where the most people's income falls).
That all said: all you're doing is shuffling around the money, not adding in new money, and in any sane way of doing it (pay x% of the mean income and fund it with a flat x% tax) it wouldn't even change the ordering of who's richer, or the qualitative shape of the curve; it just scales the curve on the y-axis, centered on the value of the mean income. That means that some people at the very top are less able to to afford the highest rents (and $2000/mo is barely affordable by someone barely in the top 20% of incomes), and those prices would come down in consequence. And yes, the prices of the cheaper places would likely come up too, for the reasons you give; more demand, no change in supply. (Although supply does change in response to demand, and this would lead to more lower-cost housing being built instead of more higher-cost housing, which would also be a benefit). But as a result, the difference between a cheap place and an expensive place is lower, and the difference in effective incomes between the poor people living in the cheap places and the rich people living in the expensive places is smaller, which means that it is easier to change, by your other life choices, whether or not you can afford the expensive place. And that is the whole point of this exercise, to make moving from poor to rich (or vice versa) less a matter of scaling (or falling off) a sheer cliff, and more a matter of climbing up (or down) some stairs. The slope from poor to rich, as represented on a graph of income distributions, is literally less steep, and so figuratively much easier to climb.
If you have a choice between two shit sandwiches, but one of them is dried, grass-fed cow shit, and the other is a hot steaming pile of HIV-positive human shit, it's absolutely true that they're both shit and you'd be best off eating neither, but it's even more clear which one you should choose if you have no choice but to eat one or the other.
He's not a liar. He's worse. He's a bullshitter. As elaborated in one of my favorite philosophical works, On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that a liar knows and cares what is true and false and is deliberately trying to make people believe things that are false; while a bullshitter couldn't care less whether the things he's saying are true or false, so long as people believe what it is useful to him that they believe. If that should happen to be true, how convenient, and if not, no loss, because the bullshitter never cared to begin with.
A properly implemented basic income basically does nothing more than rescale the vertical axis of of an income distribution curve, centered on the mean income. A basic income of around, say, $1000/mo, would be around 25% of the mean income. To fund that and remain revenue neutral would thus require a 25% additional income tax (which would be more than offset by the basic income it's paying for for the vast majority of people). Those together have the effect of moving every point on a graph of income distribution to 75% of its previous distance (on the y-axis) from the mean income's position (on the y-axis). The total amount of money in the economy remains the same, the lineup of who is richer than who remains the same, the qualitative shape of the income curve remains the same, it just gets a little squished vertically. You didn't suddenly print a bunch of free money, you just shuffled it around a little bit. Why would that cause rampant inflation? Some people have more money to spend, sure, and others have a little less. The amount of money in circulation is the same. Whence the inflation?
How are people supposed to get independent of their parents if they can't get the income they need to be independent of them until they are independent of them?
What about people who are students and don't have parents that they can be dependent on, working their way through school? Do they get the money they need to survive, or the lower student income? Do the first group above (people struggling to get independent of their parents) have to go through a barely-surviving stage like this before you start paying them enough to survive?
What about working people who go back to school to try to get training to get better, higher-paying jobs? Do you cut their pay while they're doing that?
the fact that until you find a job that exceeds that you get no benefit
This is not true, or shouldn't be and doesn't need to be true.
Let's say we set the basic income to 50% the mean wage (which would be about $25k/year basic income, or a little over $2k/mo), and fund it by a 50% tax on all incomes (which is more than offset by the basic income for about 75% of the populace who currently fall below that mean income). A homeless with no income thus suddenly has a free income of about $2k/mo. But every nominal dollar they earn on top of that, they still get to keep 50 cents of it. If they get a full time minimum wage job, that amounts to over $600/mo extra. If they get a full time median-wage job (around $25k), that amounts to around $1000/mo extra. On top of the basic income. By the time they're working a full-time mean-wage job (around $50k), they're making twice as much as the basic income, after basic income and the taxes they pay to fund it are factored in (and the basic income and the taxes they pay to fund it exactly cancel out in that case). And even at that point, there is still motive to continue working; if they make twice that again, they're still going to end up with yet another extra $1000/mo or so (compared to the mean income) after taxes and basic income are accounted for.
If you were to make the basic income something more like $1000/mo, which is barely enough to survive off of in many places (that's slightly more than what my destitute mother's SSI pays), or about 25% the mean income (or half the median income), and fund that with a 25% additional income tax, then instead people would be able to keep 75 cents out of every dollar they earn, on top of their basic income.
In any case, you'd have to set the basic income up in some kind of pants-on-head retarded way (like the way current welfare payments like SSI are set up) in order for it to not pay off to work unless you can get a job paying more than the basic income pays. Any sane way of doing it would provide incentive to work more at any income level. Yes, even the people making a millions per year: if the choice is between doing something that beings in another million of which you get to keep half or three-quarters or whatever, or not doing that and getting nothing at all, which do you think people are going to choose?
There being so few people rich enough to do anything with their ideas and so many poor people consequently beholden to those rich people is bad.
If the money actually flowed from the idle rich to the hardworking poor then the problem would solve itself, but it seems somehow (*coughrentandinterestcough*) the money always ends up flowing right back into the hands of the rich to spend over and over again ad infinitum, and never actually accrues in the hands of the poor who are nominally being paid it.
I mean, when did burger flipping become a "real job" instead of something teens did in high school?
When jobs on that pay scale became the only kinds of jobs that an enormous fraction of the populous can get (and having a job working for someone else became necessary for survival because everything everywhere is owned by someone else so you either work for whoever will hire you or die).
I think he's saying that Trump does 'retard hands' as a way of mocking people in general, not specifically this one disabled person. Which would seem plausibly in character for him, though not especially better than doing it just in this one case. I've asked GP to provide an example to confirm if that is true.
First off, "fake news" doesn't mean what you're using it to mean here. Editorial, spin, distortion, or misinterpretation of real events to score political points is not "fake news". Deliberately making up complete fabrications out of whole cloth, knowing (on the part of the creator) that they are fake, and trying to get other people to believe it, is what "fake news" means.
Second, I'd like to see an example of Trump mocking an able-bodied person in the same way as he mocked the disabled person in question. (It seems plausible that he maybe does 'retard hands' like that as a way of mocking people in general, which still is not great on his part, but I'd like to know for the record whether that's really the case or not).
I can see where it comes from easily. You try appealing to someone's reason and it fails. You try appealing to someone's empathy and it fails. You're arguing against a closed-minded heartless brick wall of an opponent; you're not really going to convince them of anything, in any way, because their purpose in life is to disagree with you no matter what. So the best you can do is hope to dissuade others from falling in with their same lot, and one way to do that is to just publicly look down on the opponent, snub them, make them seem like the uncool kid who nobody wants to be like. So you get smug. Your opponent is an obvious moron and you publicly can't see any reason why anyone with two brain cells to rub together would so much as give them the time of day. They're not even worth listening to. Hopefully, if you give off that air, people won't listen to them, and won't fall into the trap out of which they can't be reasoned. Of course if someone asks what makes them so uncool, you still give reasons, but the default before that conversation happens is just an air of them not even being worth talking about.
Time travelers already learned their lesson with Hitler. With no Trump presidency, there's no WWIII, and the technology that leads to time travel never gets invented, so using time travel to prevent America from getting trumped is pointless because paradox. Just like with Hitler and WWII, so since we already learned our lesson about how futile such things are there, none of us bother trying to run face first into paradox over Trump. Sad.
If you're invested in index funds, as you should be, the performance of your investment tracks the performance of the overall market, so if things bounce back in a week, it doesn't matter to you if a bunch of inefficiently human-managed mutual funds lost a bunch of money in that dip, the market is back up so so are your indexed investments and you're still doing just fine.
$100k household income is about 200% the median household income, so that not the best choice for "middle class". (It is around the mean household income, but some 75% of Americans are below the mean. Then again, real middle class status based on rent and interest expenses vs unearned incomes is large unattainable to even that 75% percentile, so maybe that's not such a bad choice, somewhere between the "like most people" and "actually capital-neutral" senses of "middle class").
Not that that undermines the rest of your point.
Or maybe most people are shit, or you're stuck in a context where most people are shit and you can't escape it to one where people are generally better...