a lot compared to a PC and the PC didn't come down until years later (when the P166 MMX got released. I remember it because it killed off what little was left of the Amiga & Atari ST market when you could suddenly get a P166 MMX with 16 megs of ram for around $999).
There's an amazing video on youtube of a 286 gaming PC being put through it's paces. It's impressive as heck what it could do until you realize there's about $5k of hardware there compared to a $1k Amiga.
every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances. It also indoctrinates kids into what can only be called the Cult of Capitalism. Seriously, when I was in school we were taught Capitalism & the Free Market like it as a religion. No competing theories, not even a discussion of how our government intervenes to keep the whole thing from shitting the bed every 10 years.
and we just put a bunch of anti-science nut jobs who want to dismantle the only source of organized response to crisis in power. Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody likes partisanship around here. But come one. I think it's pretty clear these guys aren't worried about themselves or us...
out of the box. Stuff like Popcorn Time where it's not just easy but has a good enough UI you might mistake it for legit content. And if you're in your 50s and paying $80/mo for internet it might not occur to you that you don't have the right to download anything you see. Hell, if you know what it costs to provide internet ($9/mo last I heard from Comcast's SEC filing) you might not care...
now how about drastically higher resolution for my eyes. While they're at it get me a 32 core i10 or a Ryzen 13 or whatever that can push that many pixels.
to support a nationwide store. Those geeks are going to buy online for a fraction of the cost. There occasional geek that needs an extra capacitor isn't going to support a large chain...
but America losing it's manufacturing base probably hit them just as hard. Nobody's encouraging kids to go into EE anymore because there's no jobs to speak of (out side of the top end design work, which just doesn't employ that many). I'm not gonna buy my kid a bunch of electronics to learn for a career that finished going overseas in the 90s.
Their other problem is convergence. Used to be you'd have a stereo that did Records, Tapes maybe even 8 track and if you were rich CD. You'd have phones in every room of your house, a computer with extra wiring for your second phone line and a camcorder and a CB in your car. All that's just a phone and maybe a cheap receiver with bluetooth for the phone to connect to.
by law you can't be held liable for more than $50 bucks of fraud and I've never seen anyone held for that (maybe on the really crappy cards you use to rebuild credit after a messy divorce?). As long as you read your statement once a month the one who's gonna lose out here is Chipotle. Especially since they're not doing chip 'n pin.
That's food, shelter, healthcare, education, transportation. Wages are going up around 2%. Youngungs can't stay around because they're constantly on the move for more money to stay ahead of inflation. Most fail, some succeed. We celebrate the ones that succeed and ignore the ones that fail...
a small group of billionaires owns just about everything. Prices didn't fall after 2008. Also, we're not building. The government usually puts money into infrastructure so that builders can do the cheap work of throwing up a frame and some spackle and make tons of money. After 30 years of tax cuts the government isn't doing that anymore.
We're heading for dystopia. It's not going to just correct itself. Take action now.
If you trade your old phone in you get a new one every year for $500. I'm not going to talk about the service fees because, like cars, we've made cell phones a necessity. If you don't have one you're marked as weird and will have doors closed to you.
Now, $500/yr sounds like a lot if you can't do math. Lets say our Hypothetical Millennial buys a $100 phone and replaces it every 2 years ( I own cheap phones, they start getting crashy and failing in about 2 years). They're saving $450/year now. They need $40k for a down payment on a 'starter' home in a city with a job market (it's not good living in a place where I can buy a house for $40k if I can't get a job to pay for it). 40,000/$450 = 88 years.
Nows the part where you point out their coffee is $5 bucks a day or about $1800/yr. With our savings from our cell phone that's just 17 years to get our starter home. Of course, there's this little thing called inflation and this other little thing called Wage Stagnation. So in 17 years our plucky Millennial's savings are worth about 3/4 what they were (I'm being _very_ charitable here with my math).
The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money. Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys. Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...
Unless you're independently wealthy you went to a public school on public roads grades K-12. If you're in your 40s you went to a University that was heavily subsidized by tax payers to hide the true cost of your education (unless you're rich or one of those rare geniuses who gets a full ride to a private U like Harvard, in which case what the hell are you doing wasting your time on/.?).
You road the benefits bandwagon with the rest of us. It was just cleverly disguised as a car you paid for so you wouldn't get all uppity about accepting the help you need. We do the same thing with social security. Remember Ayn Rand? She lived out her old age on it.
the cost hasn't gone up. We pulled federal funding during the Clinton era. I was in college then and the college newspapers were all talking about it. Bush continued to pull funding and Obama did (or could do) nothing to restore it. College has always been expensive as fuck. We used to hide that by taxing the rich to pay for the working class' education. In the 90s and 2000s we stopped doing that.
What you saying sounds nice but it's just not true in practice. We had strong family unites for thousands of years and abject poverty for all but a few kings.
Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s. They slow down, make more mistakes and generally just aren't as productive. By then they're spending what little energy they have keeping themselves alive, not paying their kids mortgages. Yes, there are exceptions. You and your family are probably one of them. But they're exceptions. By the time I'm 50 I'm going to be basically worthless to my kid like my Dad and mom were to me and their dad and mom where to them.
No, it's not family that fought a successful battle against poverty. It's a) war reducing unnecessary population b) technology (especially food growing) allowing us to feed more people and c) government taking an active and positive role in the economy to prevent things like the dust bowls of the 30s. Family doesn't hurt, but don't say it'll stop or even slow poverty. You've got 5 thousand years of recorded history proving you wrong.
thanks to our medical system their parents are going to be broke leaving nothing but medical debt and a "reverse" mortgage that means even their house gets claimed by debtors when they die.
Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer? I know that's not what you said, but it's the sentiment you're expressing. I hear it over and over and over again. I once worked for a company that cut everyone's pay and said (with a straight face) it was OK because they were cutting the starting pay even more. And I can't tell you the number of minimum wage earners I know who oppose a rate hike because they happen to make $11/hr and feel that somebody else starting there makes their struggle to make it to $11/hr worthless. It cheapens them and lowers their standing.
What you're doing is measuring your quality of life subjectively instead of objectively. E.g. the "Starving kid's in China" thing. It's been used for thousands of years by the ruling class to divide the working class into groups at each other's throat. There's an old joke about it that nails it pretty well.
TL;DR. Stop looking down on the Millennials for having it marginally less worse than you and start organizing with them to demand better. You deserve it. They deserve it. Everybody deserves it.
at $5 a day it'll only take 20 years to save up the $40k downpayment for a typical 3 bed/2bath house (good thing housing prices aren't going up faster than inflation so that $40k won't be the equivalent of $20k in 20 years...). Or if you're Australian skip the Avo-Toast.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering the reason home prices are sky rocketing is cuts in government infrastructure spending. The government was putting up the money to do the expensive stuff to get the land ready for home building so that companies could throw up cheap houses and make billions. As soon as the government stopped doing that (thanks, 30 years of tax cuts and trickle down econ) home building screeched to a halt and that investment capital shifted to.com style unicorns like Uber pushing the gig economy and whathaveyou.
Your entire quality of life in America is based on your job. Healthcare, time off, time for your children, pensions... There's been an understanding that if you work hard for your company they'll take care of you. Whether that was ever really true or not the good economy blows it all up.
so you could actually analyze the effect of giving everyone a UBI. Low income earners income becomes much more valuable when it's _consistent_. They can take risks they normally couldn't (like move to a city where the cost of living is low and education is affordable).
We also heavily control prices of basic goods in this country. Food is subsidized and farming is regulated and planned. Housing is also heavily subsidized in the form of infrastructure spending (you thought home builders paid for their own sewer, gas, electrical lines or even preparing the land for use? silly). Our government interferes in the free market constantly to prevent it from doing exactly the sort of things you're describing because when we didn't we got dust bowls and great depressions.
nobody there has any debt. If you made it into Harvard you either got a full ride or your parents are rich. He's addressing the American Ruling Class and a few geniuses that will serve them.
And voluntary help has _never_ done. How many Christians do you know paying their tithe? Left on their own people get picked apart by scoundrels and blaggards. John Galt is a myth. A nasty one at that. In a civilization you're forced to work together for the same reason you're forced to obey the speed limit. If you don't want to there's a perfectly cave in the Ozarks you can go live in. The rest of us are trying to run a society here.
It's Universal _Basic_ Income. The point of UBI is to neuter the Rich's main source of power: the threat of death from starvation when you lose your job. People can and will still work for extra money for nicer things. As an added benefit that folks no longer have to move to the expensive cities where the jobs are. They can spread out and make better use of their space.
of automation and productivity increases making a large # of people obsolete. That's the real reason we're talking about UBI. Unless you're going to make tons of pointless work for those folks you're not gonna have employment. Worse, half the point of UBI is to let folks live decent lives outside the big cities where cost of living is really high. But if they still have to move to where the work is they can't do that.
Now, if you're goal is to have the appearance of taking care of those people while either not doing it or just plain exploiting them... Not trying to accuse you of that but I'm saying that somebody is going to want to use your idea for just that.
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Also, why is it Change.org if it's for profit? Aren't orgs suppose to be non-profits?
adjusted for inflation. Assuming you're younger than 50 that is.
a lot compared to a PC and the PC didn't come down until years later (when the P166 MMX got released. I remember it because it killed off what little was left of the Amiga & Atari ST market when you could suddenly get a P166 MMX with 16 megs of ram for around $999).
There's an amazing video on youtube of a 286 gaming PC being put through it's paces. It's impressive as heck what it could do until you realize there's about $5k of hardware there compared to a $1k Amiga.
every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances. It also indoctrinates kids into what can only be called the Cult of Capitalism. Seriously, when I was in school we were taught Capitalism & the Free Market like it as a religion. No competing theories, not even a discussion of how our government intervenes to keep the whole thing from shitting the bed every 10 years.
and we just put a bunch of anti-science nut jobs who want to dismantle the only source of organized response to crisis in power. Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody likes partisanship around here. But come one. I think it's pretty clear these guys aren't worried about themselves or us...
out of the box. Stuff like Popcorn Time where it's not just easy but has a good enough UI you might mistake it for legit content. And if you're in your 50s and paying $80/mo for internet it might not occur to you that you don't have the right to download anything you see. Hell, if you know what it costs to provide internet ($9/mo last I heard from Comcast's SEC filing) you might not care...
now how about drastically higher resolution for my eyes. While they're at it get me a 32 core i10 or a Ryzen 13 or whatever that can push that many pixels.
to support a nationwide store. Those geeks are going to buy online for a fraction of the cost. There occasional geek that needs an extra capacitor isn't going to support a large chain...
but America losing it's manufacturing base probably hit them just as hard. Nobody's encouraging kids to go into EE anymore because there's no jobs to speak of (out side of the top end design work, which just doesn't employ that many). I'm not gonna buy my kid a bunch of electronics to learn for a career that finished going overseas in the 90s.
Their other problem is convergence. Used to be you'd have a stereo that did Records, Tapes maybe even 8 track and if you were rich CD. You'd have phones in every room of your house, a computer with extra wiring for your second phone line and a camcorder and a CB in your car. All that's just a phone and maybe a cheap receiver with bluetooth for the phone to connect to.
by law you can't be held liable for more than $50 bucks of fraud and I've never seen anyone held for that (maybe on the really crappy cards you use to rebuild credit after a messy divorce?). As long as you read your statement once a month the one who's gonna lose out here is Chipotle. Especially since they're not doing chip 'n pin.
+5 isn't enough. The problem with the world is that it takes both hard work _and_ luck to succeed. The people who do almost immediately forget that.
That's food, shelter, healthcare, education, transportation. Wages are going up around 2%. Youngungs can't stay around because they're constantly on the move for more money to stay ahead of inflation. Most fail, some succeed. We celebrate the ones that succeed and ignore the ones that fail...
a small group of billionaires owns just about everything. Prices didn't fall after 2008. Also, we're not building. The government usually puts money into infrastructure so that builders can do the cheap work of throwing up a frame and some spackle and make tons of money. After 30 years of tax cuts the government isn't doing that anymore.
We're heading for dystopia. It's not going to just correct itself. Take action now.
If you trade your old phone in you get a new one every year for $500. I'm not going to talk about the service fees because, like cars, we've made cell phones a necessity. If you don't have one you're marked as weird and will have doors closed to you.
Now, $500/yr sounds like a lot if you can't do math. Lets say our Hypothetical Millennial buys a $100 phone and replaces it every 2 years ( I own cheap phones, they start getting crashy and failing in about 2 years). They're saving $450/year now. They need $40k for a down payment on a 'starter' home in a city with a job market (it's not good living in a place where I can buy a house for $40k if I can't get a job to pay for it). 40,000/$450 = 88 years.
Nows the part where you point out their coffee is $5 bucks a day or about $1800/yr. With our savings from our cell phone that's just 17 years to get our starter home. Of course, there's this little thing called inflation and this other little thing called Wage Stagnation. So in 17 years our plucky Millennial's savings are worth about 3/4 what they were (I'm being _very_ charitable here with my math).
The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money. Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys. Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...
Unless you're independently wealthy you went to a public school on public roads grades K-12. If you're in your 40s you went to a University that was heavily subsidized by tax payers to hide the true cost of your education (unless you're rich or one of those rare geniuses who gets a full ride to a private U like Harvard, in which case what the hell are you doing wasting your time on /.?).
You road the benefits bandwagon with the rest of us. It was just cleverly disguised as a car you paid for so you wouldn't get all uppity about accepting the help you need. We do the same thing with social security. Remember Ayn Rand? She lived out her old age on it.
the cost hasn't gone up. We pulled federal funding during the Clinton era. I was in college then and the college newspapers were all talking about it. Bush continued to pull funding and Obama did (or could do) nothing to restore it. College has always been expensive as fuck. We used to hide that by taxing the rich to pay for the working class' education. In the 90s and 2000s we stopped doing that.
What you saying sounds nice but it's just not true in practice. We had strong family unites for thousands of years and abject poverty for all but a few kings.
Most People are basically useless by the time their in their mid 50s. They slow down, make more mistakes and generally just aren't as productive. By then they're spending what little energy they have keeping themselves alive, not paying their kids mortgages. Yes, there are exceptions. You and your family are probably one of them. But they're exceptions. By the time I'm 50 I'm going to be basically worthless to my kid like my Dad and mom were to me and their dad and mom where to them.
No, it's not family that fought a successful battle against poverty. It's a) war reducing unnecessary population b) technology (especially food growing) allowing us to feed more people and c) government taking an active and positive role in the economy to prevent things like the dust bowls of the 30s. Family doesn't hurt, but don't say it'll stop or even slow poverty. You've got 5 thousand years of recorded history proving you wrong.
thanks to our medical system their parents are going to be broke leaving nothing but medical debt and a "reverse" mortgage that means even their house gets claimed by debtors when they die.
Instead of demanding better conditions for yourself you want the Millennials to suffer? I know that's not what you said, but it's the sentiment you're expressing. I hear it over and over and over again. I once worked for a company that cut everyone's pay and said (with a straight face) it was OK because they were cutting the starting pay even more. And I can't tell you the number of minimum wage earners I know who oppose a rate hike because they happen to make $11/hr and feel that somebody else starting there makes their struggle to make it to $11/hr worthless. It cheapens them and lowers their standing.
What you're doing is measuring your quality of life subjectively instead of objectively. E.g. the "Starving kid's in China" thing. It's been used for thousands of years by the ruling class to divide the working class into groups at each other's throat. There's an old joke about it that nails it pretty well.
TL;DR. Stop looking down on the Millennials for having it marginally less worse than you and start organizing with them to demand better. You deserve it. They deserve it. Everybody deserves it.
at $5 a day it'll only take 20 years to save up the $40k downpayment for a typical 3 bed/2bath house (good thing housing prices aren't going up faster than inflation so that $40k won't be the equivalent of $20k in 20 years...). Or if you're Australian skip the Avo-Toast.
.com style unicorns like Uber pushing the gig economy and whathaveyou.
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering the reason home prices are sky rocketing is cuts in government infrastructure spending. The government was putting up the money to do the expensive stuff to get the land ready for home building so that companies could throw up cheap houses and make billions. As soon as the government stopped doing that (thanks, 30 years of tax cuts and trickle down econ) home building screeched to a halt and that investment capital shifted to
Your entire quality of life in America is based on your job. Healthcare, time off, time for your children, pensions... There's been an understanding that if you work hard for your company they'll take care of you. Whether that was ever really true or not the good economy blows it all up.
so you could actually analyze the effect of giving everyone a UBI. Low income earners income becomes much more valuable when it's _consistent_. They can take risks they normally couldn't (like move to a city where the cost of living is low and education is affordable).
We also heavily control prices of basic goods in this country. Food is subsidized and farming is regulated and planned. Housing is also heavily subsidized in the form of infrastructure spending (you thought home builders paid for their own sewer, gas, electrical lines or even preparing the land for use? silly). Our government interferes in the free market constantly to prevent it from doing exactly the sort of things you're describing because when we didn't we got dust bowls and great depressions.
nobody there has any debt. If you made it into Harvard you either got a full ride or your parents are rich. He's addressing the American Ruling Class and a few geniuses that will serve them.
And voluntary help has _never_ done. How many Christians do you know paying their tithe? Left on their own people get picked apart by scoundrels and blaggards. John Galt is a myth. A nasty one at that. In a civilization you're forced to work together for the same reason you're forced to obey the speed limit. If you don't want to there's a perfectly cave in the Ozarks you can go live in. The rest of us are trying to run a society here.
It's Universal _Basic_ Income. The point of UBI is to neuter the Rich's main source of power: the threat of death from starvation when you lose your job. People can and will still work for extra money for nicer things. As an added benefit that folks no longer have to move to the expensive cities where the jobs are. They can spread out and make better use of their space.
of automation and productivity increases making a large # of people obsolete. That's the real reason we're talking about UBI. Unless you're going to make tons of pointless work for those folks you're not gonna have employment. Worse, half the point of UBI is to let folks live decent lives outside the big cities where cost of living is really high. But if they still have to move to where the work is they can't do that.
Now, if you're goal is to have the appearance of taking care of those people while either not doing it or just plain exploiting them... Not trying to accuse you of that but I'm saying that somebody is going to want to use your idea for just that.