Yes but he had claimed that a person making $120k is paying about 25% to the Federal government. The problem is you're paying 21% to the Federal government by the time you hit $38k, and then above that you're paying 31% or more. That's more than what was claimed to come out of taxes excluding State taxes.
and it's rare that individuals working 12 hour days would come home and bake their own bread
Lulz, I did it. It's faster than shopping, except you usually shop in bulk for things. Honestly, though, making a couple loaves of bread takes half an hour. Also, "working 12 hour days" isn't a thing; if it is, your $170,000 salary is $54/hr, while a 40-hour worker making $110k is getting paid a better wage. Yes, I've been 24-hours on-call before; and I worked 9-5 doing it.
The food analogy and bread baking thing was actually more interesting because it shows we can solve things like poverty by new types of welfare because those things became cheaper. Otherwise it was an extreme; you can still spend $100-$120 on pre-packaged meals and cook them in the microwave, you slob. I make sandwiches for the week in 20 minutes. I used to make my own sushi for lunch in the morning and then bicycle 7 miles to my IT Security job--it took me 20 minutes to cook breakfast while making sushi, and then I spent 15 minutes eating, and in that time managed to also prep everything else to leave for work including doing 15 minutes of Wii Fit. Cooked half a cornish hen or whatever else for dinner. Spent about 90% of my not-at-work time playing around on the Internet.
I wish I could find a reasonable sized 960 sq foot home in a decent neighborhood. instead all you can find is giant oversized homes that really stupid people want because they hate their families.
Yeah, it's a society thing, and a market thing. Low-demand goods have higher margins because the market is high barrier to entry (easy to supply, but if you try to supply it you'll be trying to grab for a very small spread of customers, and competing with highly-experienced businesses with wide margins and stronger negotiating power with suppliers). If you want a small house, you have to pay for a custom job--and it's not going to save you much now, oops.
Basically, nearly 100% of Americans decided or accepted that houses are just big. The middle-class moved out of small houses as the generations rolled around, and now that shit gets handed off to the poor--ghettos full of 1300sqft houses inhabited by two-worker minimum-wage families pulling $30k/year. As a result, neighborhoods where people with actual money want to live have big ass houses; if you want to live in a small house, you can live in a slum. Don't like it? Pony up an enormous amount of money to have a tiny house built on your own tract of land.
The Social Security Wage Base is $118k, so someone making between about $38k and $118k actually pays 31%-34% on the upper portion of their income, and someone making $119k pays 28% on the upper portion of their income (the part above $118k) until they hit the $192k (33%) bracket (at which point they're still paying less). It isn't until you hit $417k that you enter a tax bracket (35%, with the 39.6% bracket at $419k) above the total Federal income tax (OASDI+general) imposed on the middle-class.
Note that payroll also has to fork out an additional 6.2% of OASDI, meaning the price of products must factor in the employee's base wage as the stated wage plus 6.2% to include Federal income and OASDI taxes. Executives tend to make $20-$50 per employee, so those high-powered salaries represent $0.01-$0.025 per hour; whereas the hidden portion of the 12.4% OASDI tax represents $1.674/hr for the median $54,000 income worker.
You can deduct contributions to your 401(k), IRA, and HSA; you can't deduct OASDI, and you can't deduct from OASDI. You also pay for OASDI and income tax out of production--you work some labor hours, you make wage for those hours, that represents wealth (things are made), and a portion of those things (the buying power of your income is things made for that income, essentially) is taken to build roads or pay welfare. OASDI is itself also taxed as income, yet isn't tied to production; instead, that portion of income is double-taxed, once when a good or service is produced via labor (income on wages), and again when that money is handed out to retirees (income on money not applied to any productive work). The same is true of welfare. Money isn't magic, and is directly backed by the productive output of the labor for which wage is paid; that representation is distorted when welfare is taxed as income. Obviously, if you paid tax-free into 401(k), that wage came from labor but wasn't taxed (yet), so should be considered income when taken as distribution.
Tax systems and monetary policies are complex. I constantly argue for a Universal Social Security as an untaxed benefit fed by a dedicated flat tax in parallel to a general fund for the above reasons. Besides that such a system would necessarily take and distribute a percentage of the per-capita buying power (takes it as a USS tax alongside the general progressive income tax; redistributes it flat and untaxed), it also allows us to flatten out that middle-class tax peak without raising taxes on anyone.
The very-poor can't live the high life in NYC or SF on that, and they don't really do that today; they'd have a minimum income on which to live, and any work would dramatically improve their quality-of-life without the threat of losing their welfare income as in today's system. OASDI is easy to grandfather, easy to replace with savings (the people who can't save also don't receive OASDI today), and eventually overtaken by the growing purchasing power of the USS (trade and technical progress means it grows in buying power). Minimum wage loses its importance because everyone has an income which automatically adjusts for actual buying power--which means it grows faster than inflation--and can refuse to work for unfairly-low wages, since life sucks living in a tiny apartment with meager comforts, but life is also stable and doesn't involve freezing to death in the winter while fighting over trash with the rats.
By the by, sales tax is complete trash. Sales-taxable-income represents a smaller proportion of an individual's income when he buys services and securities than when he buys tangible goods; thus the rich pay the same tax rate on less of their income, thus pay what amounts to a lower proportion of their income in taxes. The poor pay a greater proportion of their income in sales taxes. That makes it analogous to an income tax in which the poorest pay the highest rates and the richest pay the lowest. On top of that, it directly raises the sale price of goods w
The "traditional limit" assumes all expenses scale across all income levels and that technology sits at a standstill forever.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month (I can actually feed a human passably for $25/mo, but that's a grueling exercise in finances). This is because it still costs $5.83 for 50 pounds of bread flour at Sam's Club no matter what city you're in; the same goes for beans, various meats (although beef is cheap in Wisconsin--still expensive as all hell; pork is cheap everywhere), and a lot of other things. Vegetables are universally-expensive--even frozen--although I don't put much stock in vegetables; I put more vegetables in stock.
Food in home basically doesn't scale, while food out of home scales linearly: a 16-inch pizza will cost you $12 in Baltimore and $30 in Seattle. Chain fast food might hold about the same price--McDonalds doesn't charge $4 for a hamburger anywhere--and everything else tries to play up to the area's income spread. Likewise, you can get the same clothing (and you can order it online for the same price--size yourself in Sears if you want), electronics, and cars, at the same price, anywhere in the country; people like to use cars as a metric because the most commonly bought car in rich areas costs $38k, and the most commonly bought cars in poor areas costs $12k, and then they can say an "affordable" car in San Francisco is $28k and so people "can't afford a new car" and thus complain about rich people and salaries again.
With all that in mind, food has fallen from 40% of the median-income household spending in 1900 to 33% in 1950, and then to 12.5% today as agricultural technology advanced rapidly up to the 1980s (and continued more-moderately since). Clothing has fallen from 12% of expenses in 1950 to 3.5% today. We spend 6% to buy more and better healthcare than we got on the 4% we paid in 1950; and we spend an utter assload (about 40%) on entertainment, luxury, and other discretionary spending, versus about 25% in the 50s.
While that suggests that spending more than the traditionally-prescribed amount on housing is viable, your financial management plans may suggest it's less-sustainable than you'd like--you still have a smaller proportion of your income to pull from if you get into a pinch. That would be sound finances, but every single person in America has ignored that as the median new single-family home size increased from 978sqft in 1950 to 2,300sqft in 2010, and the percent of income spent on housing (shelter plus utilities, maintenance, etc.) increased from 28% to 33%. People can buy more stuff, so they spend a bigger proportion of their income to buy much larger houses in which to keep all this stuff; if they had just stayed with 978sqft homes and the 400sqft 1-bedroom apartments of the 1920s, they'd only spend 14% on housing today, as a national average--New York would still rape you for renting a 395sqft studio.
So yeah. Maybe grow up a little and get your head out of the 50s. Technical progress happens.
The plural of anecdote is data, and currently data from the deployed fleet of (very few) tens of thousands of Teslas demonstrates that loss at these levels is standard behavior and fully-expected of a Tesla battery in a Tesla car. Tesla's battery management system attempts to keep the battery at optimum temperature and avoid overcharge and undercharge.
Zero Motorcycles are similar. They recommend getting the Zero plugged into charging at a temperature above 0C, as extremely low temperatures will damage the Zero battery; the BMS will keep the battery warm/cool and charged to the appropriate level for storage if left hooked-up long term. I'm not sure if their BMS is as advanced as Tesla's, and would need statistics and information specifically on cooling of the battery in hotter climates to make further determinations; Tesla uses liquid cooling and has a heat pump available in the car, so they can keep the battery cool in hot weather so long as there's sufficient power.
Obviously, cars stored on battery power in adverse conditions will fare worse. If you want your battery to last, keep your car plugged in so the active management systems don't undercharge the battery and don't give up on temperature management.
All the outdated research in the world won't stop you from being wrong if the facts don't agree with your conclusions.
Actually, if he's doing a lifelong, pay-up-front insurance model, it will be a lot more expensive to stop providing it later. The rates have to increase with cost and inflation (which will be slower than income increases), and such an insurance model is essentially flow-through and uses new money to pay for current service. It's the same way Social Security works.
I doubt battery replacement will be a big expense in 20 years. In real life, we've seen those batteries perform such that they should still have 94% of their charge capacity after 100,000 miles. At 20 years in and 12,000 miles per year, 240,000 miles, they'll quite likely have 85% of their capacity--which means the 150 mile range is a 136 mile range. With high-voltage DC J1772 combined charge connectors, you can power that up in an hour (Tesla has supercharger stations boasting something ridiculous like 50% charge in 20 minutes). Some of these Teslas have a 280-mile range, which still gives you a 238 mile range--over 2 hours between recharging on a road trip. The extra 15-30 miles is as many minutes of driving, so is insignificant--either the long trip has too many charges already, or it's a minor inconvenience that shifts your schedule by a few minutes.
Consider modern vehicles have a 200-300 mile range. My Mazda 3 needs a gas tank fill-up every 240 miles--about 2 weeks. Since most people aren't filling their 12-gallon tank every day ($800/month of gasoline), we can surmise the range of a Tesla is well more than the range required for nearly 100% of driving. When that range decreases by 15%... you're still using 10% of the battery's charge, then charging back up when you get home. Shrug.
The battery has to start physically failing before it needs real replacing. Even if it's a $12,000 battery, it'll be an $8,000 battery or a $6,000 battery in 20 years (plus inflation--which means it might still be a $12k battery, but the median income will be $118k anyway so it's still half as expensive). Amortize that over 20 years. Gas today is $600/year (with 2% inflation over 20 years: $891); battery tech taking half the labor (low-maintenance, self-driving, electric freight haulers to deliver heavy shit; automated factories) means you'd be looking at $300/year paid in the inflated future. You're comparing roughly $20k of gas to $6k of batteries--and, again, you can probably defer the battery replacement.
Consider that plus the damn things require a bit under 1/4 of the cost of gasoline--you're looking at $5k over 20 years there. So you're saving $9k out of $20k. You could also get a Zero SR and pay about $1,620 over 20 years instead.
None of the people in this discussion have mentioned the real evil destroying our world.
Books. Newspapers. Written language. When Gutenberg's press came into existence, there was a Swedish psychologist warning everyone that we'd all experience information overload, social withdrawal, and all manner of ills becoming addicted to the vast mountains of text sent our way. The family is destroyed as the father now reads the paper at breakfast instead of interacting with his household, and the children read their books instead of playing with other children.
When will we destroy this great tool of Satan which has corrupted the hearts of good men?
More ridiculous is the claim that including crypto will force WordPress to implement better security. WordPress can just ignore this; and getting hacked by shitty REST API authentication verification isn't fixed by pouring on more crypto sauce.
This guy is a crypto nerd who thinks crypto solves all problems. It doesn't. He probably has databases with columns (UserID, UserName, CryptedPassword, AESKey) so the password is AES-encrypted with an individual key per-user.
Yes well, some people hear the word "Agile" and don't bother to look up what that means. There are published standards on this stuff, you know. They're built on top of other published standards. I don't like the SCRUM terminology largely because I work better with direct information instead of social idealism--therapy for me involves a pencil and a clipboard while the psychiatrist tries to explain wtf is wrong inside my head, not group-hug sessions, supportive friends, and pep talks--but it's still actually a highly-bureaucratic, defined process. I simply have to decode the metaphor to something concrete to access it.
Sprints are SCRUM. You don't need to use SCRUM to perform agile project management.
User stories are an attempt to dress up requirements gathering and the requirements traceability matrix. In project management, a requirement has a business justification and a stakeholder. The Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) will tell you the requirement (what?), the stakeholder (who?), the business justification (why?), and the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) elements which implement the requirement (how?). User stories attempt to make this relatable by describing it in child-friendly terms: "As the manager of finances, I want to be able to compare categorized expenses from different time periods so that I can identify where our major expenses are and how new controls impact those expenses."
As you point out, this is kind of silly for an OpenGL back-end. The user story is something like "as a user on an operating system which doesn't support DirectX, I want to be able to use the software so that I can use the software," or something equally generic. In a RTM, you would simply identify stakeholders as "Linux users" and "MacOSX users", and give the business justification that "the software platform does not support the DirectX back-end". In an actual business, you might identify the product manager as the stakeholder, and use the business justification that demographic data shows interest among MacOSX users. There's no need to invent a fancy story.
If I had a client that would request a demo every 2 weeks I'd have been fired long ago.
If something deliverable can't be produced in 2 weeks, then it can't be delivered every 2 weeks. Plain and simple. Sometimes the next iteration or incremental deliverable takes months to ship. Nobody who knows what they're doing actually implements a 2-week rule; some people use that as a soft guide-line to wring out the WBS (which is used in SCRUM and other agile methodologies), and even then they find that some work packages are necessarily hours or days long while others take longer than 2 weeks.
The standard delineation for work packages is "when the work is broken down to a level at which further decomposition no longer provides a management benefit," which effectively means you only decompose work which cannot be fully understood and measured as a whole unit. "Actigraphy Module" for a generic polysomnography application, for example, is insufficient: you have to break that down at least to include Interfaces, Base Classes, Zero Crossing Class, Time Above Threshold Class, and Digital Integration Class. You might also include, at that level, an Integrations deliverable, which breaks down to include FitBit, Pillow, EightSleep, Jawbone, and other actigraphy-based systems, because "Integrations" is made up of complex pieces and can't be estimated without thinking about the pieces from which it's made.
None of that comes out to "two-weeks". It still comes out to iterative and incremental delivery, user feedback, and compiling lessons learned repeatedly to avoid further defects.
Actually, agile software development improves quality by delivering on shorter development cycles. What's the point of spending 2 years developing a multi-million-dollar, fully-featured content management system when requirements change out from under you? Every piece that doesn't work as well in the real world as it does for QA will break all at once when you ship it out--welcome to beta software--and features will do what users wanted two years ago.
With agile development, you deliver in pieces. You do iterative development, producing a framework or basis upon which to build further components. You do incremental development, producing fully-functional components which you can deliver immediately for use. Further development on iterative components reveals defects and design deficiencies, and so you refactor, re-engineer, and adjust to meet requirements. Delivery of a working component generates user feedback, which allows you to detect and correct for defects and changes to requirements.
At every stage, you generate more knowledge. Producing each piece, iterating on each framework, and responding to each piece of user feedback generates information which is folded into the further parts of the project. Rather than dumping one piece onto the pile of shit-to-deliver-later and blissfully working on the next, you get told that the shit you just made isn't what we need, and you can reflect on that and the implications for the next piece of the project. That means each piece takes into account the failures encountered so far, and the final product delivers closer to actual requirements at delivery time.
Part of planning is applying knowledge you have. Agile project management allows you to generate new knowledge at every stage and roll that forward into planning the next stage. You can't apply knowledge you don't have.
Bad ideas not recognized as bad ideas--daresay, not even considered as to whether they were productive efforts at all--lead to repetition of wasteful behaviors. For the longest time, doctors recommended strychnine as a prophylactic against disease and fatigue.
Is a man-made production process for solid sheets of aluminum oxide and for tiled sheets of zero-distortion interfaced aluminum oxide in nature? Does nature give us a way to perfectly-control the physical and optical properties of aluminum oxide using caveman-level tools?
Gasoline is in nature. We separate it out from a pile of muck pumped out of the ground. The same with iron ore and the steel made from it. There's an argument for communism and socialism which explains that all property is theft because the natural state is that we can go anywhere and take anything, and then suddenly things which we were allowed to take are claimed to belong to someone else and thus have been stolen from us; this argument ignores that human labor is required to acquire, shape, and distribute objects as made from natural things. Giant sheets of alox to precisely-engineered specifications aren't natural, you toolshed.
You cannot be serious... Do you have any idea what kinds of technology advancement NASA has been a primary driver of?
Memory foam, maybe. The general list is things that would have been invented anyway--although some of those things would have instead been DOD projects (satellite communication) more than likely. Velcro was invented by a guy who observed stupid shit like the Greater Burdock sticking itself to dogs and pants.
We've managed to invent things like transparent aluminum without NASA or the DOD; the DOD has been running with it, finding new ways to make it, polish it, and otherwise improve the stuff. In most cases, this is stuff someone already invented but that isn't viable for the consumer market yet, and so is mainly a profit source from government money; in many cases, it's stuff that's too expensive to research at a given level of technology, and becomes viable to invent a decade later; in very rare case it is only uncertain if DOD and NASA interest was the cause of an actual invention or only the cause of it being profitable or invented earlier than it would have been.
People have a hard-on for space travel and war, and they believe all kinds of delusional shit about how things just won't ever happen without a good war to make us invent new tech. No matter how technology marches on in peace time and without public-funded science experiments to fund it, people assert that certain technology must be special and would never happen from just commercial interests. They ignore the real world.
So in short: Grow up and stop believing in Santa Clause.
If the money is spent paying Google, Netflix, Verizon, or other engineers, we end up with newer infrastructure, better services, and the like. If it's spent building rockets to circle the moon, then we still pay this (not just "we pay it in taxes", but the labor is spent and the labor is compensated--we work and we exchange our time for this), and what do we receive?
Wasteful spending reduces the amount of stuff you receive for the work you do. That's true across an entire economy for obvious reasons (if half the farmers instead make war machines, half the food doesn't get made, and you pay for war machines that only go out to get blown up). What are we gaining by spending $23 billion here?
True, although apparently TFS doesn't mention that this wasn't his first offense and he's like this all the damn time, so HR lied. First mistake, you learn; second mistake, you fucked up twice the same way.
Median income growth was -2.3% in the US (that is just a hard fact) over the 8 years since Obama took office.
You mean through a recession caused by the Clintons, which came to force right at the end of Bush's economy-destroying war?
I know personally that 10 years ago I could buy more with my dollar than today
That's called inflation. The question is: could you buy more with the median income of dollars then than you can now? Answer is no.
Fact: The labor participation rates under Obama were the lowest they have been in 40 years (since Jimmy Carter).
Labor participation rates reflect the percent of working-aged Americans who feel they need a job. That is to say: if a two-adult, poor household is struggling to get by and both adults believe they need jobs, you have two people in the labor force; if a two-adult, middle-income household is comfortable and the woman decides to stay home and not seek employment because the household finances are fine and life is comfortable, you have one person in the labor force.
Labor force participation rates don't reflect the ability or lack thereof to get a job. Higher participation rates can reflect cultural behaviors (e.g. social status based in employment) or economic crisis (e.g. people can't survive, so every man, woman, and 16-year-old high schooler works themselves to the bone to try to get by). Lower participation rates reflect economic comfort.
elected Trump to do what every other leader of every other country around the world does and is expected to do: put his own country's interests first..
Cutting off the import of just men's and boys's pants from China means minimum-wage Americans work 3.03 hours instead of 1.87 hours to afford a pair of pants; median-income Americans work 0.92 instead of 0.55 hours to afford a pair of pants; and factory workers producing those Made-in-America pants work for minimum wage. If the factory workers make, say, $21/hr, then the minimum-wage Americans work over 6.13 hours to afford them; middle-incomes work 1.87 hours; and we have ~90,000 fewer American jobs in total versus current economy (a 0.06% increase in unemployment rate).
Is working long hours for lower pay in the interest of our own country?
Is expanding poverty to more households in America in the interest of our own country?
Is destroying good American jobs, either for hazardous low-pay jobs or simply to create a hole in our job market and an increase in unemployment, in the interest of our own country?
If you want to see the direction Trump is steering America, look to North Korea.
On the other hand these prices have fallen slightly
Two things when discussing economics like this.
First, prices are meaningless if we don't discuss them as prices in labor. If you pay $100 now for a microwave you paid $75 for in 1990, that's pretty meaningless. If the median wage earns that microwave in 3.7 hours today but 4.9 hours in 1990, the price of that microwave has decreased. If the median wage earns that microwave in 3.7 hours today but 3.3 hours in 1990, the price of that microwave has increased.
Second, equivalent-technology comparisons are almost never available. Today I purchase Internet for $86/month; but that's 200Mbit/s internet. In 1998, a 128k ISDN line leased for $35/month; this $83 line is equivalent to 1562.5 ISDN lines, which would lease for $54,687.50 in 1998. I believe Comcast had 1.28Mbit into the house for $40/month in 1998, meaning $350/month of ISDN downstream was suddenly replaced with $40/month of cable downstream; and by those numbers, I'm buying $6,250/month worth of cable for $83/month. You will not find 1.28Mbit internet for 53 cents today.
That second point applies to cars (more-complex antilock brakes, suspension, safety systems, radios, etc. at price levels equivalent to the same proportion of a target income), phones ($350 Motorola V3 Razor? I got my OnePlus One 64GB for $350; the OnePlus 3t is $440), computers, heat pumps, and information services (Netflix, Spotify, etc.). $10/month gets you access to enormous feeds of movies and music; $20 used to get you a CD with 11 songs.
In particular reference to your list, it's well-known that Americans spend more money on more and better healthcare now than in decades past. Housing is odd: the per-square-foot share of housing has fallen (i.e. 1,000 square feet of housing represents a smaller proportion of the median income), while houses and apartments have gotten bigger; and housing is also a speculatively-traded commodity, so its price fluctuates a lot along the way. Housing is also often misrepresented by sale price rather than by total price paid or mortgage payment; I believe the CES accounts housing based on actual expense (mortgage/rent, maintenance, insurance) rather than sale prices, which tends to incorporate additional expenses over the base cost of housing rather than exclude large chunks of the base cost of housing.
Food has also gotten vastly cheaper over time, and is somewhere around 12.5% of household income for the median-income household, although this has been relatively flat compared to the movement in the 40s-80s (16% in 1990). I find vehicle maintenance on a downward trend myself, but I suspect an actual economic analysis as done with food, housing, and medical care would reveal a flat trend; I've bought better vehicles with lower maintenance costs, and the economic reality is probably different than my personal experience.
College prices have been out-of-control for policy reasons which require long and complicated discussions. That's a sore spot in public policy which has distorted the economics considerably, leading to rising tuition prices and out-of-control student debt.
At least the total number of jobs has been increasing since March, 2010 [stlouisfed.org].
My point was more that the data doesn't say we're seeing jobs "come back to America" since January, 2017; we don't have enough data to see the movement of unemployment in general--just the seasonal dip after December. As for March to now, yes, we've long-term seen the total jobs increase faster than the total population and the total work force, hence why unemployment fell from 10% to 4.6%.
But yes, the labor force participation rate is higher than when women worked in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant...
The kitchen now has dishwashers and floor-mopping robots. Roombas handle the rest of the house. Automatic washing machines and dryers mean laundry day
Uh, 5% unemployment at historically-high labor force participation rates? We're not at peak, but we're above the 59% historical labor force maximum participation rate. Even adjusting for a peak participation rate and counting the number of employed against that, unemployment rates wouldn't break 6%.
Consumer goods have had all of 2 months to deal with all of nothing. Consumer goods are still made where they've been made for the past decade and a half.
Wages can't stagnate. It's mathematically-impossible. You know all those tech job layoffs, reorganizations, and other shit that ended with fewer total IT workers in one department or another? Those reduced the number of labor-hours of wages paid to make things. For prices to stay the same, you have to raise wages to compensate for that reduction; yet we have inflation, which means wages are being raised even faster than that. That means wages are actually rising faster than inflation--they have to, or else you don't have inflation.
People like to adjust wages directly to inflation, and somehow get "real wages" that stay flat or decrease while the median-income buying power of those wages increases. Middle- and lower-class people are spending more of their income on luxuries, and are obtaining more and better healthcare than before. Food and clothing are more affordable. Utilities aren't growing in price as fast as wages. Median-income Americans today can buy more than people of 5, 10, and 20 years ago, and yet we say "their wages are going down". Falling wages are the kind of lie people repeat to themselves at night to give them a reason to be angry at not being rich.
We can't see anything about jobs coming back yet. Unemployment was 0.1% higher in January 2017 than December 2016--no surprise, there's always that slump. Where will it be in June? In 2018?
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Yes but he had claimed that a person making $120k is paying about 25% to the Federal government. The problem is you're paying 21% to the Federal government by the time you hit $38k, and then above that you're paying 31% or more. That's more than what was claimed to come out of taxes excluding State taxes.
and it's rare that individuals working 12 hour days would come home and bake their own bread
Lulz, I did it. It's faster than shopping, except you usually shop in bulk for things. Honestly, though, making a couple loaves of bread takes half an hour. Also, "working 12 hour days" isn't a thing; if it is, your $170,000 salary is $54/hr, while a 40-hour worker making $110k is getting paid a better wage. Yes, I've been 24-hours on-call before; and I worked 9-5 doing it.
The food analogy and bread baking thing was actually more interesting because it shows we can solve things like poverty by new types of welfare because those things became cheaper. Otherwise it was an extreme; you can still spend $100-$120 on pre-packaged meals and cook them in the microwave, you slob. I make sandwiches for the week in 20 minutes. I used to make my own sushi for lunch in the morning and then bicycle 7 miles to my IT Security job--it took me 20 minutes to cook breakfast while making sushi, and then I spent 15 minutes eating, and in that time managed to also prep everything else to leave for work including doing 15 minutes of Wii Fit. Cooked half a cornish hen or whatever else for dinner. Spent about 90% of my not-at-work time playing around on the Internet.
Maybe you're just slow.
I wish I could find a reasonable sized 960 sq foot home in a decent neighborhood. instead all you can find is giant oversized homes that really stupid people want because they hate their families.
Yeah, it's a society thing, and a market thing. Low-demand goods have higher margins because the market is high barrier to entry (easy to supply, but if you try to supply it you'll be trying to grab for a very small spread of customers, and competing with highly-experienced businesses with wide margins and stronger negotiating power with suppliers). If you want a small house, you have to pay for a custom job--and it's not going to save you much now, oops.
Basically, nearly 100% of Americans decided or accepted that houses are just big. The middle-class moved out of small houses as the generations rolled around, and now that shit gets handed off to the poor--ghettos full of 1300sqft houses inhabited by two-worker minimum-wage families pulling $30k/year. As a result, neighborhoods where people with actual money want to live have big ass houses; if you want to live in a small house, you can live in a slum. Don't like it? Pony up an enormous amount of money to have a tiny house built on your own tract of land.
The Social Security Wage Base is $118k, so someone making between about $38k and $118k actually pays 31%-34% on the upper portion of their income, and someone making $119k pays 28% on the upper portion of their income (the part above $118k) until they hit the $192k (33%) bracket (at which point they're still paying less). It isn't until you hit $417k that you enter a tax bracket (35%, with the 39.6% bracket at $419k) above the total Federal income tax (OASDI+general) imposed on the middle-class.
Note that payroll also has to fork out an additional 6.2% of OASDI, meaning the price of products must factor in the employee's base wage as the stated wage plus 6.2% to include Federal income and OASDI taxes. Executives tend to make $20-$50 per employee, so those high-powered salaries represent $0.01-$0.025 per hour; whereas the hidden portion of the 12.4% OASDI tax represents $1.674/hr for the median $54,000 income worker.
You can deduct contributions to your 401(k), IRA, and HSA; you can't deduct OASDI, and you can't deduct from OASDI. You also pay for OASDI and income tax out of production--you work some labor hours, you make wage for those hours, that represents wealth (things are made), and a portion of those things (the buying power of your income is things made for that income, essentially) is taken to build roads or pay welfare. OASDI is itself also taxed as income, yet isn't tied to production; instead, that portion of income is double-taxed, once when a good or service is produced via labor (income on wages), and again when that money is handed out to retirees (income on money not applied to any productive work). The same is true of welfare. Money isn't magic, and is directly backed by the productive output of the labor for which wage is paid; that representation is distorted when welfare is taxed as income. Obviously, if you paid tax-free into 401(k), that wage came from labor but wasn't taxed (yet), so should be considered income when taken as distribution.
Tax systems and monetary policies are complex. I constantly argue for a Universal Social Security as an untaxed benefit fed by a dedicated flat tax in parallel to a general fund for the above reasons. Besides that such a system would necessarily take and distribute a percentage of the per-capita buying power (takes it as a USS tax alongside the general progressive income tax; redistributes it flat and untaxed), it also allows us to flatten out that middle-class tax peak without raising taxes on anyone.
The very-poor can't live the high life in NYC or SF on that, and they don't really do that today; they'd have a minimum income on which to live, and any work would dramatically improve their quality-of-life without the threat of losing their welfare income as in today's system. OASDI is easy to grandfather, easy to replace with savings (the people who can't save also don't receive OASDI today), and eventually overtaken by the growing purchasing power of the USS (trade and technical progress means it grows in buying power). Minimum wage loses its importance because everyone has an income which automatically adjusts for actual buying power--which means it grows faster than inflation--and can refuse to work for unfairly-low wages, since life sucks living in a tiny apartment with meager comforts, but life is also stable and doesn't involve freezing to death in the winter while fighting over trash with the rats.
By the by, sales tax is complete trash. Sales-taxable-income represents a smaller proportion of an individual's income when he buys services and securities than when he buys tangible goods; thus the rich pay the same tax rate on less of their income, thus pay what amounts to a lower proportion of their income in taxes. The poor pay a greater proportion of their income in sales taxes. That makes it analogous to an income tax in which the poorest pay the highest rates and the richest pay the lowest. On top of that, it directly raises the sale price of goods w
The "traditional limit" assumes all expenses scale across all income levels and that technology sits at a standstill forever.
Even in the Bay area, I can feed an individual human pretty decently for under $100/month (I can actually feed a human passably for $25/mo, but that's a grueling exercise in finances). This is because it still costs $5.83 for 50 pounds of bread flour at Sam's Club no matter what city you're in; the same goes for beans, various meats (although beef is cheap in Wisconsin--still expensive as all hell; pork is cheap everywhere), and a lot of other things. Vegetables are universally-expensive--even frozen--although I don't put much stock in vegetables; I put more vegetables in stock.
Food in home basically doesn't scale, while food out of home scales linearly: a 16-inch pizza will cost you $12 in Baltimore and $30 in Seattle. Chain fast food might hold about the same price--McDonalds doesn't charge $4 for a hamburger anywhere--and everything else tries to play up to the area's income spread. Likewise, you can get the same clothing (and you can order it online for the same price--size yourself in Sears if you want), electronics, and cars, at the same price, anywhere in the country; people like to use cars as a metric because the most commonly bought car in rich areas costs $38k, and the most commonly bought cars in poor areas costs $12k, and then they can say an "affordable" car in San Francisco is $28k and so people "can't afford a new car" and thus complain about rich people and salaries again.
With all that in mind, food has fallen from 40% of the median-income household spending in 1900 to 33% in 1950, and then to 12.5% today as agricultural technology advanced rapidly up to the 1980s (and continued more-moderately since). Clothing has fallen from 12% of expenses in 1950 to 3.5% today. We spend 6% to buy more and better healthcare than we got on the 4% we paid in 1950; and we spend an utter assload (about 40%) on entertainment, luxury, and other discretionary spending, versus about 25% in the 50s.
While that suggests that spending more than the traditionally-prescribed amount on housing is viable, your financial management plans may suggest it's less-sustainable than you'd like--you still have a smaller proportion of your income to pull from if you get into a pinch. That would be sound finances, but every single person in America has ignored that as the median new single-family home size increased from 978sqft in 1950 to 2,300sqft in 2010, and the percent of income spent on housing (shelter plus utilities, maintenance, etc.) increased from 28% to 33%. People can buy more stuff, so they spend a bigger proportion of their income to buy much larger houses in which to keep all this stuff; if they had just stayed with 978sqft homes and the 400sqft 1-bedroom apartments of the 1920s, they'd only spend 14% on housing today, as a national average--New York would still rape you for renting a 395sqft studio.
So yeah. Maybe grow up a little and get your head out of the 50s. Technical progress happens.
The plural of anecdote is data, and currently data from the deployed fleet of (very few) tens of thousands of Teslas demonstrates that loss at these levels is standard behavior and fully-expected of a Tesla battery in a Tesla car. Tesla's battery management system attempts to keep the battery at optimum temperature and avoid overcharge and undercharge.
Zero Motorcycles are similar. They recommend getting the Zero plugged into charging at a temperature above 0C, as extremely low temperatures will damage the Zero battery; the BMS will keep the battery warm/cool and charged to the appropriate level for storage if left hooked-up long term. I'm not sure if their BMS is as advanced as Tesla's, and would need statistics and information specifically on cooling of the battery in hotter climates to make further determinations; Tesla uses liquid cooling and has a heat pump available in the car, so they can keep the battery cool in hot weather so long as there's sufficient power.
Obviously, cars stored on battery power in adverse conditions will fare worse. If you want your battery to last, keep your car plugged in so the active management systems don't undercharge the battery and don't give up on temperature management.
All the outdated research in the world won't stop you from being wrong if the facts don't agree with your conclusions.
Actually, if he's doing a lifelong, pay-up-front insurance model, it will be a lot more expensive to stop providing it later. The rates have to increase with cost and inflation (which will be slower than income increases), and such an insurance model is essentially flow-through and uses new money to pay for current service. It's the same way Social Security works.
I doubt battery replacement will be a big expense in 20 years. In real life, we've seen those batteries perform such that they should still have 94% of their charge capacity after 100,000 miles. At 20 years in and 12,000 miles per year, 240,000 miles, they'll quite likely have 85% of their capacity--which means the 150 mile range is a 136 mile range. With high-voltage DC J1772 combined charge connectors, you can power that up in an hour (Tesla has supercharger stations boasting something ridiculous like 50% charge in 20 minutes). Some of these Teslas have a 280-mile range, which still gives you a 238 mile range--over 2 hours between recharging on a road trip. The extra 15-30 miles is as many minutes of driving, so is insignificant--either the long trip has too many charges already, or it's a minor inconvenience that shifts your schedule by a few minutes.
Consider modern vehicles have a 200-300 mile range. My Mazda 3 needs a gas tank fill-up every 240 miles--about 2 weeks. Since most people aren't filling their 12-gallon tank every day ($800/month of gasoline), we can surmise the range of a Tesla is well more than the range required for nearly 100% of driving. When that range decreases by 15%... you're still using 10% of the battery's charge, then charging back up when you get home. Shrug.
The battery has to start physically failing before it needs real replacing. Even if it's a $12,000 battery, it'll be an $8,000 battery or a $6,000 battery in 20 years (plus inflation--which means it might still be a $12k battery, but the median income will be $118k anyway so it's still half as expensive). Amortize that over 20 years. Gas today is $600/year (with 2% inflation over 20 years: $891); battery tech taking half the labor (low-maintenance, self-driving, electric freight haulers to deliver heavy shit; automated factories) means you'd be looking at $300/year paid in the inflated future. You're comparing roughly $20k of gas to $6k of batteries--and, again, you can probably defer the battery replacement.
Consider that plus the damn things require a bit under 1/4 of the cost of gasoline--you're looking at $5k over 20 years there. So you're saving $9k out of $20k. You could also get a Zero SR and pay about $1,620 over 20 years instead.
None of the people in this discussion have mentioned the real evil destroying our world.
Books. Newspapers. Written language. When Gutenberg's press came into existence, there was a Swedish psychologist warning everyone that we'd all experience information overload, social withdrawal, and all manner of ills becoming addicted to the vast mountains of text sent our way. The family is destroyed as the father now reads the paper at breakfast instead of interacting with his household, and the children read their books instead of playing with other children.
When will we destroy this great tool of Satan which has corrupted the hearts of good men?
More ridiculous is the claim that including crypto will force WordPress to implement better security. WordPress can just ignore this; and getting hacked by shitty REST API authentication verification isn't fixed by pouring on more crypto sauce.
This guy is a crypto nerd who thinks crypto solves all problems. It doesn't. He probably has databases with columns (UserID, UserName, CryptedPassword, AESKey) so the password is AES-encrypted with an individual key per-user.
Yes well, some people hear the word "Agile" and don't bother to look up what that means. There are published standards on this stuff, you know. They're built on top of other published standards. I don't like the SCRUM terminology largely because I work better with direct information instead of social idealism--therapy for me involves a pencil and a clipboard while the psychiatrist tries to explain wtf is wrong inside my head, not group-hug sessions, supportive friends, and pep talks--but it's still actually a highly-bureaucratic, defined process. I simply have to decode the metaphor to something concrete to access it.
Sprints are SCRUM. You don't need to use SCRUM to perform agile project management.
User stories are an attempt to dress up requirements gathering and the requirements traceability matrix. In project management, a requirement has a business justification and a stakeholder. The Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM) will tell you the requirement (what?), the stakeholder (who?), the business justification (why?), and the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) elements which implement the requirement (how?). User stories attempt to make this relatable by describing it in child-friendly terms: "As the manager of finances, I want to be able to compare categorized expenses from different time periods so that I can identify where our major expenses are and how new controls impact those expenses."
As you point out, this is kind of silly for an OpenGL back-end. The user story is something like "as a user on an operating system which doesn't support DirectX, I want to be able to use the software so that I can use the software," or something equally generic. In a RTM, you would simply identify stakeholders as "Linux users" and "MacOSX users", and give the business justification that "the software platform does not support the DirectX back-end". In an actual business, you might identify the product manager as the stakeholder, and use the business justification that demographic data shows interest among MacOSX users. There's no need to invent a fancy story.
If I had a client that would request a demo every 2 weeks I'd have been fired long ago.
If something deliverable can't be produced in 2 weeks, then it can't be delivered every 2 weeks. Plain and simple. Sometimes the next iteration or incremental deliverable takes months to ship. Nobody who knows what they're doing actually implements a 2-week rule; some people use that as a soft guide-line to wring out the WBS (which is used in SCRUM and other agile methodologies), and even then they find that some work packages are necessarily hours or days long while others take longer than 2 weeks.
The standard delineation for work packages is "when the work is broken down to a level at which further decomposition no longer provides a management benefit," which effectively means you only decompose work which cannot be fully understood and measured as a whole unit. "Actigraphy Module" for a generic polysomnography application, for example, is insufficient: you have to break that down at least to include Interfaces, Base Classes, Zero Crossing Class, Time Above Threshold Class, and Digital Integration Class. You might also include, at that level, an Integrations deliverable, which breaks down to include FitBit, Pillow, EightSleep, Jawbone, and other actigraphy-based systems, because "Integrations" is made up of complex pieces and can't be estimated without thinking about the pieces from which it's made.
None of that comes out to "two-weeks". It still comes out to iterative and incremental delivery, user feedback, and compiling lessons learned repeatedly to avoid further defects.
Actually, agile software development improves quality by delivering on shorter development cycles. What's the point of spending 2 years developing a multi-million-dollar, fully-featured content management system when requirements change out from under you? Every piece that doesn't work as well in the real world as it does for QA will break all at once when you ship it out--welcome to beta software--and features will do what users wanted two years ago.
With agile development, you deliver in pieces. You do iterative development, producing a framework or basis upon which to build further components. You do incremental development, producing fully-functional components which you can deliver immediately for use. Further development on iterative components reveals defects and design deficiencies, and so you refactor, re-engineer, and adjust to meet requirements. Delivery of a working component generates user feedback, which allows you to detect and correct for defects and changes to requirements.
At every stage, you generate more knowledge. Producing each piece, iterating on each framework, and responding to each piece of user feedback generates information which is folded into the further parts of the project. Rather than dumping one piece onto the pile of shit-to-deliver-later and blissfully working on the next, you get told that the shit you just made isn't what we need, and you can reflect on that and the implications for the next piece of the project. That means each piece takes into account the failures encountered so far, and the final product delivers closer to actual requirements at delivery time.
Part of planning is applying knowledge you have. Agile project management allows you to generate new knowledge at every stage and roll that forward into planning the next stage. You can't apply knowledge you don't have.
Bad ideas not recognized as bad ideas--daresay, not even considered as to whether they were productive efforts at all--lead to repetition of wasteful behaviors. For the longest time, doctors recommended strychnine as a prophylactic against disease and fatigue.
Is a man-made production process for solid sheets of aluminum oxide and for tiled sheets of zero-distortion interfaced aluminum oxide in nature? Does nature give us a way to perfectly-control the physical and optical properties of aluminum oxide using caveman-level tools?
Gasoline is in nature. We separate it out from a pile of muck pumped out of the ground. The same with iron ore and the steel made from it. There's an argument for communism and socialism which explains that all property is theft because the natural state is that we can go anywhere and take anything, and then suddenly things which we were allowed to take are claimed to belong to someone else and thus have been stolen from us; this argument ignores that human labor is required to acquire, shape, and distribute objects as made from natural things. Giant sheets of alox to precisely-engineered specifications aren't natural, you toolshed.
You cannot be serious... Do you have any idea what kinds of technology advancement NASA has been a primary driver of?
Memory foam, maybe. The general list is things that would have been invented anyway--although some of those things would have instead been DOD projects (satellite communication) more than likely. Velcro was invented by a guy who observed stupid shit like the Greater Burdock sticking itself to dogs and pants.
We've managed to invent things like transparent aluminum without NASA or the DOD; the DOD has been running with it, finding new ways to make it, polish it, and otherwise improve the stuff. In most cases, this is stuff someone already invented but that isn't viable for the consumer market yet, and so is mainly a profit source from government money; in many cases, it's stuff that's too expensive to research at a given level of technology, and becomes viable to invent a decade later; in very rare case it is only uncertain if DOD and NASA interest was the cause of an actual invention or only the cause of it being profitable or invented earlier than it would have been.
People have a hard-on for space travel and war, and they believe all kinds of delusional shit about how things just won't ever happen without a good war to make us invent new tech. No matter how technology marches on in peace time and without public-funded science experiments to fund it, people assert that certain technology must be special and would never happen from just commercial interests. They ignore the real world.
So in short: Grow up and stop believing in Santa Clause.
That's only temporal: was it a bad idea, and should we hang someone for not stopping it?
Bad ideas don't become good ideas just because they've already done their damage.
How would the money be well spent?
If the money is spent paying Google, Netflix, Verizon, or other engineers, we end up with newer infrastructure, better services, and the like. If it's spent building rockets to circle the moon, then we still pay this (not just "we pay it in taxes", but the labor is spent and the labor is compensated--we work and we exchange our time for this), and what do we receive?
Wasteful spending reduces the amount of stuff you receive for the work you do. That's true across an entire economy for obvious reasons (if half the farmers instead make war machines, half the food doesn't get made, and you pay for war machines that only go out to get blown up). What are we gaining by spending $23 billion here?
GNU X11, GNU Wayland, GNU GDM, GNU Gnome, GNU Systemd, GNU vim, GNU apt, GNU python, GNU perl, GNU Network-Manager, GNU udev, GNU lvm2-utils...
GNU has apparently written a hell of a lot of software.
True, although apparently TFS doesn't mention that this wasn't his first offense and he's like this all the damn time, so HR lied. First mistake, you learn; second mistake, you fucked up twice the same way.
Median income growth was -2.3% in the US (that is just a hard fact) over the 8 years since Obama took office.
You mean through a recession caused by the Clintons, which came to force right at the end of Bush's economy-destroying war?
I know personally that 10 years ago I could buy more with my dollar than today
That's called inflation. The question is: could you buy more with the median income of dollars then than you can now? Answer is no.
Fact: The labor participation rates under Obama were the lowest they have been in 40 years (since Jimmy Carter).
Labor participation rates reflect the percent of working-aged Americans who feel they need a job. That is to say: if a two-adult, poor household is struggling to get by and both adults believe they need jobs, you have two people in the labor force; if a two-adult, middle-income household is comfortable and the woman decides to stay home and not seek employment because the household finances are fine and life is comfortable, you have one person in the labor force.
Labor force participation rates don't reflect the ability or lack thereof to get a job. Higher participation rates can reflect cultural behaviors (e.g. social status based in employment) or economic crisis (e.g. people can't survive, so every man, woman, and 16-year-old high schooler works themselves to the bone to try to get by). Lower participation rates reflect economic comfort.
elected Trump to do what every other leader of every other country around the world does and is expected to do: put his own country's interests first..
Cutting off the import of just men's and boys's pants from China means minimum-wage Americans work 3.03 hours instead of 1.87 hours to afford a pair of pants; median-income Americans work 0.92 instead of 0.55 hours to afford a pair of pants; and factory workers producing those Made-in-America pants work for minimum wage. If the factory workers make, say, $21/hr, then the minimum-wage Americans work over 6.13 hours to afford them; middle-incomes work 1.87 hours; and we have ~90,000 fewer American jobs in total versus current economy (a 0.06% increase in unemployment rate).
Is working long hours for lower pay in the interest of our own country?
Is expanding poverty to more households in America in the interest of our own country?
Is destroying good American jobs, either for hazardous low-pay jobs or simply to create a hole in our job market and an increase in unemployment, in the interest of our own country?
If you want to see the direction Trump is steering America, look to North Korea.
On the other hand these prices have fallen slightly
Two things when discussing economics like this.
First, prices are meaningless if we don't discuss them as prices in labor. If you pay $100 now for a microwave you paid $75 for in 1990, that's pretty meaningless. If the median wage earns that microwave in 3.7 hours today but 4.9 hours in 1990, the price of that microwave has decreased. If the median wage earns that microwave in 3.7 hours today but 3.3 hours in 1990, the price of that microwave has increased.
Second, equivalent-technology comparisons are almost never available. Today I purchase Internet for $86/month; but that's 200Mbit/s internet. In 1998, a 128k ISDN line leased for $35/month; this $83 line is equivalent to 1562.5 ISDN lines, which would lease for $54,687.50 in 1998. I believe Comcast had 1.28Mbit into the house for $40/month in 1998, meaning $350/month of ISDN downstream was suddenly replaced with $40/month of cable downstream; and by those numbers, I'm buying $6,250/month worth of cable for $83/month. You will not find 1.28Mbit internet for 53 cents today.
That second point applies to cars (more-complex antilock brakes, suspension, safety systems, radios, etc. at price levels equivalent to the same proportion of a target income), phones ($350 Motorola V3 Razor? I got my OnePlus One 64GB for $350; the OnePlus 3t is $440), computers, heat pumps, and information services (Netflix, Spotify, etc.). $10/month gets you access to enormous feeds of movies and music; $20 used to get you a CD with 11 songs.
In particular reference to your list, it's well-known that Americans spend more money on more and better healthcare now than in decades past. Housing is odd: the per-square-foot share of housing has fallen (i.e. 1,000 square feet of housing represents a smaller proportion of the median income), while houses and apartments have gotten bigger; and housing is also a speculatively-traded commodity, so its price fluctuates a lot along the way. Housing is also often misrepresented by sale price rather than by total price paid or mortgage payment; I believe the CES accounts housing based on actual expense (mortgage/rent, maintenance, insurance) rather than sale prices, which tends to incorporate additional expenses over the base cost of housing rather than exclude large chunks of the base cost of housing.
Food has also gotten vastly cheaper over time, and is somewhere around 12.5% of household income for the median-income household, although this has been relatively flat compared to the movement in the 40s-80s (16% in 1990). I find vehicle maintenance on a downward trend myself, but I suspect an actual economic analysis as done with food, housing, and medical care would reveal a flat trend; I've bought better vehicles with lower maintenance costs, and the economic reality is probably different than my personal experience.
College prices have been out-of-control for policy reasons which require long and complicated discussions. That's a sore spot in public policy which has distorted the economics considerably, leading to rising tuition prices and out-of-control student debt.
At least the total number of jobs has been increasing since March, 2010 [stlouisfed.org].
My point was more that the data doesn't say we're seeing jobs "come back to America" since January, 2017; we don't have enough data to see the movement of unemployment in general--just the seasonal dip after December. As for March to now, yes, we've long-term seen the total jobs increase faster than the total population and the total work force, hence why unemployment fell from 10% to 4.6%.
But yes, the labor force participation rate is higher than when women worked in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant...
The kitchen now has dishwashers and floor-mopping robots. Roombas handle the rest of the house. Automatic washing machines and dryers mean laundry day
Uh, 5% unemployment at historically-high labor force participation rates? We're not at peak, but we're above the 59% historical labor force maximum participation rate. Even adjusting for a peak participation rate and counting the number of employed against that, unemployment rates wouldn't break 6%.
Consumer goods have had all of 2 months to deal with all of nothing. Consumer goods are still made where they've been made for the past decade and a half.
Wages can't stagnate. It's mathematically-impossible. You know all those tech job layoffs, reorganizations, and other shit that ended with fewer total IT workers in one department or another? Those reduced the number of labor-hours of wages paid to make things. For prices to stay the same, you have to raise wages to compensate for that reduction; yet we have inflation, which means wages are being raised even faster than that. That means wages are actually rising faster than inflation--they have to, or else you don't have inflation.
People like to adjust wages directly to inflation, and somehow get "real wages" that stay flat or decrease while the median-income buying power of those wages increases. Middle- and lower-class people are spending more of their income on luxuries, and are obtaining more and better healthcare than before. Food and clothing are more affordable. Utilities aren't growing in price as fast as wages. Median-income Americans today can buy more than people of 5, 10, and 20 years ago, and yet we say "their wages are going down". Falling wages are the kind of lie people repeat to themselves at night to give them a reason to be angry at not being rich.
We can't see anything about jobs coming back yet. Unemployment was 0.1% higher in January 2017 than December 2016--no surprise, there's always that slump. Where will it be in June? In 2018?
I thought we were trying to get Facebook integrated with AI Terrorism.
My primary news source is The Onion.