the alt-right movement is just a bunch of guys who can't find good jobs and, as a result, women. It's not really a movement. It's what happens when you don't have enough decent paying work for men to have and raise families. Those men are being taken advantage of by what can only be called the American Aristocracy and a right wing propaganda machine. The goal is to talk them into supporting candidates who'll do the classic alt-right economics (trickle down economics, free trade, outsourcing, etc).
So far it's working. Donald Trump, who's essentially the lead for the movement, has staffed his admin with the same Goldman Sachs folks Obama, Bush Jr and Clinton did. Trump now supports all the provisions of the TPP (but he doesn't support "the" TPP) and he's busy deregulating Wall Street while giving them massive tax cuts (another $3.5 Trillion just passed the House while we were distracted by his SCOTUS nominee's scandals).
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren are doing their best to reach out to them, but it's tough. There's a giant propaganda machine out to get them. Also the Dem's don't have Reagan's Eleventh Commandment so they eat their own (re: Al Franklin). Meanwhile the GOP is happy to give those angry guys any number of enemies to rail against (feminists, SJWs, basically "social" enemies that distract from economic issues). Not sure if Bernie & Liz are going to succeed, but they're definitely trying.
Not being a movie maker I can't say why, but the younger folks at my job like it and the old timers who grew up with the 1st 3 movies hated it. That's the thing, it's mostly young folks going to see movies. So they make moves for them. Not us.
As for Luke, as last Gen's hero he pretty much had to die. Same as Kenobi. I suppose a much, much better writer could have bridged the gaps, but that's a risky and Herculean task I can't blame Disney, or Ryan Johnson, for not trying.
Oh, and if we could just get a decent Star Wars game that wasn't a platform for micro transactions all would be forgiven. I'll be you 2/3rds of the nerd rage is up to that.
when I got stuck on a programing task in the 80s I often stayed stuck. I didn't have any good teachers and only a limited # of books. And forget about a C compiler or assembler. I didn't even know they existed let alone where to get one.
With the Internet when I hit a wall I can go on stack overflow, ask a question and 9 times out of 10 some kind soul will point out my mistake. Heck, I rarely have to do that. Odds are somebody beat me to it. Better yet, there's often 10 explanations for the same thing. That sounds redundant, but if the first 5 don't make sense #6 often does.
The Internet's a whole new world of capabilities. There's a generation who's going to grow up with all the answers at their fingertips. And rather than make them lazy I think we'll see them spend less time learning and more doing.
when it was a Democratic Senator (Bernie Sanders) who's campaigning got them to relent? Also, there's a good chance this was done to take the wind out of the sales of that law Bernie was pushing to tax corporations an equal amount of money for the government aid their employees receive. Those temp workers often still rely on gov't healthcare (esp in California). That's half the reason to hire temps (the other half to avoid paying unemployment).
I think this has less to do with capitalism and more to do with pressure coming from the government. It's kind of like how the game industry made a ratings board so the gov't wouldn't force them to do it. If you don't fix your shit the gov't will fix it for you, and they'll be a lot more thorough when they fix it than you would.
I put naked pictures of myself in folders labeled "Bank Details". It's easy to track down the hackers because of the screams, white hair and babbling about "Shub Niggurath".
because it based on polls of people asking "Do you have $1000 bucks". That's so little money that it swings wildly, from as high as 80 to as low as 60%. But I've yet to see a poll where it drops below 60%, so I'm starting to use that number so that folks like you don't try to use the variation as a straw man to discredit the (extremely valid) point that a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (e.g. they don't have enough savings to even pay 1 months rent/mortgage).
And, well, I can't really thank you for living up to my expectations and bringing up that straw man, but there it is.
And yes, we can absolutely be in an era of people having a large amount of discretionary income while the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The phrase your looking for is "income inequality". You're right that you can't have both the _majority_ of people living paycheck to paycheck AND the _majority_ of people having high discretionary income, but I don't see any evidence of that.
People buying cell phones does NOT mean they have a lot of discretionary income. It means that cell phones are cheap. Cheap Chinese electronics mean people can afford what used to be luxuries. OTOH things that used to be taken for granted (like college education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation) have become luxuries that devour the majority of people income and drive them into bankruptcy.
You can't not know this. Again, you're strawmaning. Like the Avocado Toast guy, Fox News with their "Poor people have refrigerators and yes we are going to ignore anti-slum laws that require apartments to have fridges" and of course the old standby "Welfare queens in Cadillac buying Steak & Lobster with food stamps". It's prosperity gospel. Blaming the working classes' woes, which have largely been caused by outsourcing and a global race to the bottom, on poor moral character so that you don't have to do anything about it and can feel good about abusing them.
It won't last. You're not a member of the ruling class. The ruling class doesn't post to/.. They're going to eat you alive. And me too. And everyone else reading this post. Now is the time for us to show some worker solidarity and stand up to them if we want to.
Or don't. My kid graduates college in 2 years, I only have the one and odds are good my line is gonna die out. I'll be dead from heart problems in 15 years thanks to poor genetics no matter how healthy I am. I'm starting to lose hope for you guys. I can only do so much outreach. I'm not Bernie fsckin' Sanders here.
they go on craiglist or to a sled lot and but an old SUV because they're durable as fuck and cheap to fix. Again, truck parts. I drive a really old car (25 years) and the parts I get don't last. I get 2 years out of a radiator if I'm lucky. I don't have the option to buy better parts because they don't make them. That's what happens when you drive old cars.
Your BMW is nice and all, but the parts are _expensive_ and a lot of the work can't be done without special tools. Again, truck chassis. The blue collar guys buying those things can easily work on them.
If you've got a new Focus and can afford to maintain a BMW you've probably been away from the world of the dirt poor for a while. It's very different, very weird and completely counter intuitive. The world is a mess when you're part of the working poor.
folks buy used SUVs. Old ones. 10+ years. They last 20+ years because they're built on a truck chassis. Poor people are often blue color and they know this. There's plenty of non luxury SUVs. How do you not know this? I can get an old Suburban for $5k with 150k miles and it'll go another 100k miles with minimal maintenance. Get a Sentra with 150k miles on it and it's about ready for the dump.
Of course some people have legitimate financial problems. You're cherry picking outliers to make yourself feel better about ignoring the plight of the working class. I get it. You're worried that if they're paid better, have healthcare and decent jobs that you'll lose those things. You're seeing those things slip away every day. Outside of the top 10% we all are. But dumping all over people for their mistakes isn't the solution. Yeah, if they'd put their heads down and got a college education then put their heads down some more and worked non-stop for 20 years they'd be doing OK. Not a lot of folks can do that, but us Americans act like it should be the norm. Start accepting people for who they are and you'll start seeing improvements in the world. If not things will keep going to shit, and unless you happen to be a millionaire slumming it on/. they'll take you with it.
you'll see the doubling. If you look at overall stats the service economy makes it hard to measure, leading to lower figures.
And we most certainly have had technology unemployment in the past. The Luddites weren't just overly conservative, they were losing their livelihoods. We produce twice as much with 2/3rds the workforce.
When there are new jobs they're low paying service sector jobs. But the trouble there is there's less money in the economy, so less money floating around and an overall slowdown in the economy. That's exactly what we're seeing if you take Wallstreet out of the picture. It's part of a broader trend taking us back to the gilded age of income inequality and aristocracy. Folks see it happening but don't know what to do...
price inflation isn't an issue. And productivity has doubled in the last 20 years and continues to climb (thanks to computers, better software and automation).
If anything we need shorter work weeks and higher pay to absorb job losses due to increased productivity. At my job it's been the same 3 man team for 15 years (with folks coming and going here and there) and our user base continues to increase. We haven't had to hire more because the software keeps improving so there's less to break, keeping the amount of work pretty consistent even as the number of users we support climbs.
they are put in places folks are speeding or where they have been accidents. The data shows folks slow down when they know how fast they're driving, but it's easy to ignore your gauge and just go with the flow, which usually puts you 10-15 over.
it's workers can't afford the goods they're making. An entry level 4 door sedan that's not a death mobile like the Sentra retails for $17k. I've got a 4 year old one and they're kind of junky on the inside but they do well in crashes (which the Versa does not). That's $300/mo (after taxes and the like) + $100 for insurance (more if you've had an accident recently). Plus at $15/hr you need to come up with 1.75 month's pay for a downpayment.
Yeah, you can buy used, but the price of used cars keeps going up since nobody can afford new.
in response to wage gains if there aren't matching productivity gains. We've doubled productivity in the last 20 years while wages remained the same or went down. There is a _lot_ of room for wage growth and better standards of living in America.
If I may rant a bit here, I do wish we could get rid of this pernicious lie that raising wages is pointless because it just means prices will go up. It's so obviously wrong on the face of it. If such a thing were true we'd never have gotten out of the gilded age.
that's affordable without debt even on $12 bucks an hour. That SUV is used and built on a truck platform. It may guzzle gas but it's cheaper design makes it much more reliable. When you buy a vehicle even poor folks consider total ROI (though most wouldn't know it's called ROI).
If that's all the discretionary spending you can come up with you're not trying hard enough. I mean, if you're gonna shame the poor why not go all out and mention steak, lobster and Cadillacs. Oh, and don't go looking into studies that show the pressures from poverty affect decision making or how worrying about money and food non-stop lead to mistakes. Just keep drinking deep from the well of prosperity gospel.
because after that it's debatable. I've seen it as high as 80%
We do teach kids how to live on their own. If you're an at risk kid you go through what's called "Consumer Math".
One of the things folks have a hard time with is the concept of "You can't budget what isn't there". As the saying goes nobody in America is poor, we're a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Wages have been dropping at the low end for ages. Higher pay at the top end and with professionals has masked that. But you can see the results when you look at the percentage of income folks spend on food, housing, transportation and healthcare. It's been rising non stop and with it there's less money to save.
People aren't buying McMansions either. Yes, houses are bigger than the 50s but they're cheaper to produce. Factory automation has slashed the cost of building cars while the prices sky rocketed. And among the many shitty things Bush Jr did he deregulated the commodities market. resulting in higher food prices (the effect of which was why they were regulated in the first place).
And then there's the cost of education. We have Trillions in Student Loan Debt. Right wing think tanks will tell you that it's because greedy schools are following supply and demand and raising prices to soak up quick cash. I've got a kid in school and can tell you this is bullshit. There were half as many slots in my kid's 300 level classes as there were qualified applicants (GPA 3.8 or higher, yes, that's an eight, not a zero). If the schools were pricing based on demand they'd just raise the price until they got the right number of applicants. What _did_ happen is we cut federal subsidies in the 90s and 2000s (not all at once mind you, folks would notice that). What I don't understand is why otherwise intelligent people with kids in college repeat this lie...
I guess what I"m saying is the working class is getting screwed, and I wish we'd all wake up to the fact. You can't squeeze blood from a stone and you can't budget what ain't there.
in about 20-30 years as solar, nuke & wind take over. The rest of the world is tired of worrying about the Middle East going crazy and bowing to their royals. Saudi Arabia for their part know this and are trying to figure out how to modernize. That's why they let women drive, they want them in the work force being productive and bringing cash in for the ruling class.
Right now Saudi Arabia has a modern army thanks to weapons purchased with oil money. Take the oil money away and that won't last, and the decades of pissing all over their neighbors will bite them hard. Again, they're well aware of this and are trying to pivot. The hard parts going to be that they've used religious conservatism to keep their poor in check and they're pushing back against modernization.
and I'm not really seeing that. What I _am_ seeing is a very small group of nut case feminists who are blown way out of proportion by right wing media. Show me the left wing equivalent of Alex Jones with 2 million+ followers and I'll start to buy what you're selling. But all I'm seeing is a few fat chicks running women's studies departments. Yeah, they might make your life hell for a semester while you satisfy a gen-ed requirement (if you're not clever like me and use the Chinese History course to do it), but they're ultimately powerless and completely without any sort of following let alone political power. Meanwhile the aforementioned Alex Jones has spoken directly with our president on more than one occasion...
it's "Locker room talk" and a generally unfriendly work environment.
The nerds I know have very, very little tact. The few who do know what tact is have to try really, really hard to avoid saying incredibly off color crap. There are entire books about dead baby jokes and enough jokes about dead hookers and pedophiles to fill several books over. Being a nerd and spending a lifetime around other nerds I can tell you they'll cheerfully spout these gags along with harmless Monty Python jokes and be completely obvious to the difference between the two....
They're not doing it on purpose, but like I said, no tact. That isn't to say they're being tactless. That implies they know what tact is and they're doing it on purpose. When I say no tact I mean the absence of the stuff. A complete inability to read a room.
I remember a buddy of mine at work once telling a dirty joke about a girl he knew with big boobs wearing a t-shirt with D20s on the nipples and the phrase "Yes, they're natural" methodically explaining this joke to me with our boss (who was a woman and fortunately a good sport) in the room. When I say 'no tact' that is what I mean. This was one of the tamer examples.
I don't think it's unfair when women are uncomfortable around that talk. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to teach men and boys tact. But if we're not going to have that conversation and just take for granted that it's the woman's problem, or that there's no problem at all, then we're going to lose women in science. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Now, that said, there's a lot of men who would like very much to lose those women. Part of the problem is wages. More people in your field means less money for you. I can't argue that except to say our society as a whole has it's priorities backwards and that there'd be plenty of money if we'd stop spending so much blowing up brown folk overseas. That's not me being flippant, we spent $600 billion this year dropping bombs.
And there's social status. Men, especially white men, are losing some of the high status they once had. Again, this isn't up for debate. It's just a fact. White men were treated better by and large as little as 20-30 years ago and a lot of them have taken notice of that. It's good to be the king. They got preferential treatment in loan applications, schools, job applications, police interactions and a variety of other things.
I think the correct approach is the one Bernie Sanders is taking where he works to bring everyone together. Liz Warren does the same thing. It's damn hard to do though. Our ruling class would like very much for us working class stiffs to fight among ourselves. And, well, so far we've been doing just that.
Physicists are expensive. Get women into physics and they become significantly less so. It's the same across all STEM fields. It's got nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with wages.
As an added bonus men and women are fighting among themselves over gender issues, making a nice skism in the working class.
Slashdot Mirror
the alt-right movement is just a bunch of guys who can't find good jobs and, as a result, women. It's not really a movement. It's what happens when you don't have enough decent paying work for men to have and raise families. Those men are being taken advantage of by what can only be called the American Aristocracy and a right wing propaganda machine. The goal is to talk them into supporting candidates who'll do the classic alt-right economics (trickle down economics, free trade, outsourcing, etc).
So far it's working. Donald Trump, who's essentially the lead for the movement, has staffed his admin with the same Goldman Sachs folks Obama, Bush Jr and Clinton did. Trump now supports all the provisions of the TPP (but he doesn't support "the" TPP) and he's busy deregulating Wall Street while giving them massive tax cuts (another $3.5 Trillion just passed the House while we were distracted by his SCOTUS nominee's scandals).
Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren are doing their best to reach out to them, but it's tough. There's a giant propaganda machine out to get them. Also the Dem's don't have Reagan's Eleventh Commandment so they eat their own (re: Al Franklin). Meanwhile the GOP is happy to give those angry guys any number of enemies to rail against (feminists, SJWs, basically "social" enemies that distract from economic issues). Not sure if Bernie & Liz are going to succeed, but they're definitely trying.
I thought it was pretty darn clear from TFS. I suppose our ruling class does it too now that you mention it.
Not being a movie maker I can't say why, but the younger folks at my job like it and the old timers who grew up with the 1st 3 movies hated it. That's the thing, it's mostly young folks going to see movies. So they make moves for them. Not us.
As for Luke, as last Gen's hero he pretty much had to die. Same as Kenobi. I suppose a much, much better writer could have bridged the gaps, but that's a risky and Herculean task I can't blame Disney, or Ryan Johnson, for not trying.
Oh, and if we could just get a decent Star Wars game that wasn't a platform for micro transactions all would be forgiven. I'll be you 2/3rds of the nerd rage is up to that.
they're trying to sow discord in American society in order to weaken us politically. That's it. Nothing else.
And you know what? It's working. Not that we needed very much, given how Balkanized we are, but it's like a vial of blood in a shark pool...
when I got stuck on a programing task in the 80s I often stayed stuck. I didn't have any good teachers and only a limited # of books. And forget about a C compiler or assembler. I didn't even know they existed let alone where to get one.
With the Internet when I hit a wall I can go on stack overflow, ask a question and 9 times out of 10 some kind soul will point out my mistake. Heck, I rarely have to do that. Odds are somebody beat me to it. Better yet, there's often 10 explanations for the same thing. That sounds redundant, but if the first 5 don't make sense #6 often does.
The Internet's a whole new world of capabilities. There's a generation who's going to grow up with all the answers at their fingertips. And rather than make them lazy I think we'll see them spend less time learning and more doing.
when it was a Democratic Senator (Bernie Sanders) who's campaigning got them to relent? Also, there's a good chance this was done to take the wind out of the sales of that law Bernie was pushing to tax corporations an equal amount of money for the government aid their employees receive. Those temp workers often still rely on gov't healthcare (esp in California). That's half the reason to hire temps (the other half to avoid paying unemployment).
I think this has less to do with capitalism and more to do with pressure coming from the government. It's kind of like how the game industry made a ratings board so the gov't wouldn't force them to do it. If you don't fix your shit the gov't will fix it for you, and they'll be a lot more thorough when they fix it than you would.
I put naked pictures of myself in folders labeled "Bank Details". It's easy to track down the hackers because of the screams, white hair and babbling about "Shub Niggurath".
because it based on polls of people asking "Do you have $1000 bucks". That's so little money that it swings wildly, from as high as 80 to as low as 60%. But I've yet to see a poll where it drops below 60%, so I'm starting to use that number so that folks like you don't try to use the variation as a straw man to discredit the (extremely valid) point that a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (e.g. they don't have enough savings to even pay 1 months rent/mortgage).
/.. They're going to eat you alive. And me too. And everyone else reading this post. Now is the time for us to show some worker solidarity and stand up to them if we want to.
And, well, I can't really thank you for living up to my expectations and bringing up that straw man, but there it is.
And yes, we can absolutely be in an era of people having a large amount of discretionary income while the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The phrase your looking for is "income inequality". You're right that you can't have both the _majority_ of people living paycheck to paycheck AND the _majority_ of people having high discretionary income, but I don't see any evidence of that.
People buying cell phones does NOT mean they have a lot of discretionary income. It means that cell phones are cheap. Cheap Chinese electronics mean people can afford what used to be luxuries. OTOH things that used to be taken for granted (like college education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation) have become luxuries that devour the majority of people income and drive them into bankruptcy.
You can't not know this. Again, you're strawmaning. Like the Avocado Toast guy, Fox News with their "Poor people have refrigerators and yes we are going to ignore anti-slum laws that require apartments to have fridges" and of course the old standby "Welfare queens in Cadillac buying Steak & Lobster with food stamps". It's prosperity gospel. Blaming the working classes' woes, which have largely been caused by outsourcing and a global race to the bottom, on poor moral character so that you don't have to do anything about it and can feel good about abusing them.
It won't last. You're not a member of the ruling class. The ruling class doesn't post to
Or don't. My kid graduates college in 2 years, I only have the one and odds are good my line is gonna die out. I'll be dead from heart problems in 15 years thanks to poor genetics no matter how healthy I am. I'm starting to lose hope for you guys. I can only do so much outreach. I'm not Bernie fsckin' Sanders here.
they go on craiglist or to a sled lot and but an old SUV because they're durable as fuck and cheap to fix. Again, truck parts. I drive a really old car (25 years) and the parts I get don't last. I get 2 years out of a radiator if I'm lucky. I don't have the option to buy better parts because they don't make them. That's what happens when you drive old cars.
Your BMW is nice and all, but the parts are _expensive_ and a lot of the work can't be done without special tools. Again, truck chassis. The blue collar guys buying those things can easily work on them.
If you've got a new Focus and can afford to maintain a BMW you've probably been away from the world of the dirt poor for a while. It's very different, very weird and completely counter intuitive. The world is a mess when you're part of the working poor.
folks buy used SUVs. Old ones. 10+ years. They last 20+ years because they're built on a truck chassis. Poor people are often blue color and they know this. There's plenty of non luxury SUVs. How do you not know this? I can get an old Suburban for $5k with 150k miles and it'll go another 100k miles with minimal maintenance. Get a Sentra with 150k miles on it and it's about ready for the dump.
/. they'll take you with it.
Of course some people have legitimate financial problems. You're cherry picking outliers to make yourself feel better about ignoring the plight of the working class. I get it. You're worried that if they're paid better, have healthcare and decent jobs that you'll lose those things. You're seeing those things slip away every day. Outside of the top 10% we all are. But dumping all over people for their mistakes isn't the solution. Yeah, if they'd put their heads down and got a college education then put their heads down some more and worked non-stop for 20 years they'd be doing OK. Not a lot of folks can do that, but us Americans act like it should be the norm. Start accepting people for who they are and you'll start seeing improvements in the world. If not things will keep going to shit, and unless you happen to be a millionaire slumming it on
you'll see the doubling. If you look at overall stats the service economy makes it hard to measure, leading to lower figures.
And we most certainly have had technology unemployment in the past. The Luddites weren't just overly conservative, they were losing their livelihoods. We produce twice as much with 2/3rds the workforce.
When there are new jobs they're low paying service sector jobs. But the trouble there is there's less money in the economy, so less money floating around and an overall slowdown in the economy. That's exactly what we're seeing if you take Wallstreet out of the picture. It's part of a broader trend taking us back to the gilded age of income inequality and aristocracy. Folks see it happening but don't know what to do...
price inflation isn't an issue. And productivity has doubled in the last 20 years and continues to climb (thanks to computers, better software and automation).
If anything we need shorter work weeks and higher pay to absorb job losses due to increased productivity. At my job it's been the same 3 man team for 15 years (with folks coming and going here and there) and our user base continues to increase. We haven't had to hire more because the software keeps improving so there's less to break, keeping the amount of work pretty consistent even as the number of users we support climbs.
I'm not saying we should have to pay to keep Amazon's employees fed, but it's better than the alternatives.
Still, this is great news. The public shaming (mostly from Bernie Sanders) worked. It worked for Disney too.
they are put in places folks are speeding or where they have been accidents. The data shows folks slow down when they know how fast they're driving, but it's easy to ignore your gauge and just go with the flow, which usually puts you 10-15 over.
is why aren't lasers doing cool shit?
it's workers can't afford the goods they're making. An entry level 4 door sedan that's not a death mobile like the Sentra retails for $17k. I've got a 4 year old one and they're kind of junky on the inside but they do well in crashes (which the Versa does not). That's $300/mo (after taxes and the like) + $100 for insurance (more if you've had an accident recently). Plus at $15/hr you need to come up with 1.75 month's pay for a downpayment.
Yeah, you can buy used, but the price of used cars keeps going up since nobody can afford new.
in response to wage gains if there aren't matching productivity gains. We've doubled productivity in the last 20 years while wages remained the same or went down. There is a _lot_ of room for wage growth and better standards of living in America.
If I may rant a bit here, I do wish we could get rid of this pernicious lie that raising wages is pointless because it just means prices will go up. It's so obviously wrong on the face of it. If such a thing were true we'd never have gotten out of the gilded age.
that's affordable without debt even on $12 bucks an hour. That SUV is used and built on a truck platform. It may guzzle gas but it's cheaper design makes it much more reliable. When you buy a vehicle even poor folks consider total ROI (though most wouldn't know it's called ROI).
If that's all the discretionary spending you can come up with you're not trying hard enough. I mean, if you're gonna shame the poor why not go all out and mention steak, lobster and Cadillacs. Oh, and don't go looking into studies that show the pressures from poverty affect decision making or how worrying about money and food non-stop lead to mistakes. Just keep drinking deep from the well of prosperity gospel.
because after that it's debatable. I've seen it as high as 80%
We do teach kids how to live on their own. If you're an at risk kid you go through what's called "Consumer Math".
One of the things folks have a hard time with is the concept of "You can't budget what isn't there". As the saying goes nobody in America is poor, we're a nation of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Wages have been dropping at the low end for ages. Higher pay at the top end and with professionals has masked that. But you can see the results when you look at the percentage of income folks spend on food, housing, transportation and healthcare. It's been rising non stop and with it there's less money to save.
People aren't buying McMansions either. Yes, houses are bigger than the 50s but they're cheaper to produce. Factory automation has slashed the cost of building cars while the prices sky rocketed. And among the many shitty things Bush Jr did he deregulated the commodities market. resulting in higher food prices (the effect of which was why they were regulated in the first place).
And then there's the cost of education. We have Trillions in Student Loan Debt. Right wing think tanks will tell you that it's because greedy schools are following supply and demand and raising prices to soak up quick cash. I've got a kid in school and can tell you this is bullshit. There were half as many slots in my kid's 300 level classes as there were qualified applicants (GPA 3.8 or higher, yes, that's an eight, not a zero). If the schools were pricing based on demand they'd just raise the price until they got the right number of applicants. What _did_ happen is we cut federal subsidies in the 90s and 2000s (not all at once mind you, folks would notice that). What I don't understand is why otherwise intelligent people with kids in college repeat this lie...
I guess what I"m saying is the working class is getting screwed, and I wish we'd all wake up to the fact. You can't squeeze blood from a stone and you can't budget what ain't there.
At least 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That's not middle class and it's certainly not "no longer at risk of poverty".
in about 20-30 years as solar, nuke & wind take over. The rest of the world is tired of worrying about the Middle East going crazy and bowing to their royals. Saudi Arabia for their part know this and are trying to figure out how to modernize. That's why they let women drive, they want them in the work force being productive and bringing cash in for the ruling class.
Right now Saudi Arabia has a modern army thanks to weapons purchased with oil money. Take the oil money away and that won't last, and the decades of pissing all over their neighbors will bite them hard. Again, they're well aware of this and are trying to pivot. The hard parts going to be that they've used religious conservatism to keep their poor in check and they're pushing back against modernization.
is that rich people just pay the fine and us poor slobs take our chances and hope they don't turn up anything.
and I'm not really seeing that. What I _am_ seeing is a very small group of nut case feminists who are blown way out of proportion by right wing media. Show me the left wing equivalent of Alex Jones with 2 million+ followers and I'll start to buy what you're selling. But all I'm seeing is a few fat chicks running women's studies departments. Yeah, they might make your life hell for a semester while you satisfy a gen-ed requirement (if you're not clever like me and use the Chinese History course to do it), but they're ultimately powerless and completely without any sort of following let alone political power. Meanwhile the aforementioned Alex Jones has spoken directly with our president on more than one occasion...
it's "Locker room talk" and a generally unfriendly work environment.
The nerds I know have very, very little tact. The few who do know what tact is have to try really, really hard to avoid saying incredibly off color crap. There are entire books about dead baby jokes and enough jokes about dead hookers and pedophiles to fill several books over. Being a nerd and spending a lifetime around other nerds I can tell you they'll cheerfully spout these gags along with harmless Monty Python jokes and be completely obvious to the difference between the two....
They're not doing it on purpose, but like I said, no tact. That isn't to say they're being tactless. That implies they know what tact is and they're doing it on purpose. When I say no tact I mean the absence of the stuff. A complete inability to read a room.
I remember a buddy of mine at work once telling a dirty joke about a girl he knew with big boobs wearing a t-shirt with D20s on the nipples and the phrase "Yes, they're natural" methodically explaining this joke to me with our boss (who was a woman and fortunately a good sport) in the room. When I say 'no tact' that is what I mean. This was one of the tamer examples.
I don't think it's unfair when women are uncomfortable around that talk. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to teach men and boys tact. But if we're not going to have that conversation and just take for granted that it's the woman's problem, or that there's no problem at all, then we're going to lose women in science. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
Now, that said, there's a lot of men who would like very much to lose those women. Part of the problem is wages. More people in your field means less money for you. I can't argue that except to say our society as a whole has it's priorities backwards and that there'd be plenty of money if we'd stop spending so much blowing up brown folk overseas. That's not me being flippant, we spent $600 billion this year dropping bombs.
And there's social status. Men, especially white men, are losing some of the high status they once had. Again, this isn't up for debate. It's just a fact. White men were treated better by and large as little as 20-30 years ago and a lot of them have taken notice of that. It's good to be the king. They got preferential treatment in loan applications, schools, job applications, police interactions and a variety of other things.
I think the correct approach is the one Bernie Sanders is taking where he works to bring everyone together. Liz Warren does the same thing. It's damn hard to do though. Our ruling class would like very much for us working class stiffs to fight among ourselves. And, well, so far we've been doing just that.
Physicists are expensive. Get women into physics and they become significantly less so. It's the same across all STEM fields. It's got nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with wages.
As an added bonus men and women are fighting among themselves over gender issues, making a nice skism in the working class.