The local farmer can’t supply eggs in the quantities Aldi needs, so Aldi prefers a simple supply chain with a couple of contracts with large-scale producers. Same as the other national/regional chains. Government stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws, all the retailers consolidated to drive out the independents; the six remaining grocery chains forced all their suppliers to consolidate to national-scale production; the food packagers prefer to deal with factory-scale farms… We could really use a little competition in our ‘free’ markets.

But how are you supposed to enjoy that food without an obsequious NPC to cut your steak for you? Is it even eating without an envious audience?

I’ve only heard LaTeX pronounced like latex in media where someone uses it to show what a geek some character is. eg, I’ve been typsetting my homework assignments in latex since I was 9.

If you earn $50-200k, they you’re in the 22-24% federal tax bracket, but probably pay 15-20% Federal income tax. Plus 7.65% payroll tax (also federal). Plus 5-10% state tax. Some cities have an income tax. But yeah: 25-35% total tax burden is pretty common for middle income people.

The image is 950x940 px, and an acre is 209x208 feet, so overall scale about 4.5 pixels per foot. “Lawn” is 250x310px = 55x68 ft or 3800 square feet, although the actual lawn-looking space is larger and several parcels. The fruit tree orchard is about 40x60 feet, chickens 30x30. The big cow is 15 feet long, which seems kinda big. House, excluding garage, is 32x22, which seems like a small 1 bedroom apartment.

In the US, the ACA limits insurance company expenses and profits to a fraction of their actual, delivered care. They get paid more for providing more care, and it doesn’t matter whether that “care” actually reaches or benefits a patient. They’re fine with fraud, as long as it doesn’t grow so fast that they outspend their revenues. Gotta ride the wave of costs rising fast enough to justify next year’s raise, but slow enough to hold on to this year’s bonus.

These guys claim that as much as 20% of private insurance payments are fraudulent.

The main difference is who bears the risk. For pensions, it’s the employer, who has to make extra payments if the pension fund falls behind it projected obligations, or surrender its management to PBGC. That open-ended risk is why most companies have abandoned pensions. For SS, it’s the government (although they do have the power to change their legal obligation). For annuities, it’s the recipient, who will just get less money if the annuity’s investments underperform during the accumulation phase.

SS is a defined benefit administered (and guaranteed) by an independent agent. Pension is a defined benefit administered by employer (or PBGC). Seems pretty similar to me.

Annuity is a defined contribution disbursed formulaically by a company you hired. The only similarity is the regular payment.

A huge amount of waste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67i4-_sXGcQ Claims $400/year, $35/month.

I think youre misunderstanding that I am referring to the same 20% the entire time. Yes, two different destinations for money in savings (emergency and retirement separately). Their calculations also assume that that 20% is also going towards paying down any debts.

I feel like you’re conflating assets and income. Paying down debts is not saving. Paying down debt could be a mandatory expense, like mortgage, or it could be discretionary, like paying off credit debt accumulated on that European vacation, but it’s not saving. An emergency fund is a thing you have, not a revolving account that you spend every year and re-accumulate. It can take a few years to accumulate, because you only sacrifice it for emergencies - not a car repair you’ve been putting off. The only difference between an emergency fund and retirement savings is that the government punishes you for spending designated retirement savings.

The reason I made these isnt even to argue for a certain wage of any kind. The point is to see just how far off all working class Americans are from any level of comfort.

But by choosing ‘comfortable’ as a reference, titling the post ‘cost of living,’ and comparing it to the minimum wage, you open yourself to exactly this criticism. To appearing to make a bad faith argument by exaggerating the ‘cost of living’ by including 25% surplus over the actual cost of living, not to mention 60% discretionary spending over the costs of rent, food, utilities, clothing, etc. If you’re going to compare income and lifestyle, you have to choose a lifestyle that fits the social class, otherwise you risk sounding like lawyers barely scraping by on $500k.

Where did all the money go, if people were being paid the equivalent of $35 an hour today 75 years ago?

Where did $35/hr wage come from? It’s not in any of the graphics. Minimum wage in 1950 was $0.75/hr, which is only $10.25 today. Are you referencing median wage? That would be a much better comparison with ‘comfortable’ lifestyle, but median income today is close to $60k/year, depending on how you count.

6 months worth of living expenses in 2025 is gonna be, median, $10k in rent/mortgage payments alone. That in and of itself is like 14% of someones annual income at $35 an hour.

I truly fail to see how 20% saved annually isnt something reasonable, considering the need for different draws out of some of it will come sporadically, while you also need to be saving for your retirement in some inevitably inflated future where everything is even more ridiculously expensive than it is now.

The first describes a total emergency fund of 14% annual income that would provide 6 months rent. The second describes annual contributions of 20%, which seems like it provides 6 months living expenses for every year worked. That’s an awesome goal, and kudos to anyone who can do it. I did. It let me retire at 45, which is several steps beyond “living comfortably.”

Don’t even try to pick based on performance. Whatever they did in the last year, or 5, or 10 is mostly irrelevant to what they do in the next 30. You’re betting on the economy, not on a stock picker.

Beyond that, it kind of depends on why you want an ‘SRI’ fund. If you just want someone to tell you your investments don’t make you a bad person, then pick a fund from a large brokerage with low maintenance fees, ideally in the range of 0.1%/year. If you want an SRI because you think the market is going to reward ethical companies or punish unethical companies, or because you’'re willing to sacrifice long-term performance for not actively exploiting externalities, then you need to dig into the funds a little deeper and find out what they mean by ‘social responsibility.’ It’s a hot marketing phrase right now, with no regulatory meaning, so you can be sure that there are products being called ‘socially responsible’ with little or no difference from products not so labeled.

If you actually have a specific ethical agenda, then you need to be prepared to do a lot of work. You’ll need to understand how the fund defines SRI, find out what benchmarks they use to greenlight companies, and figure out whether those benchmarks can be greenwashed. Can Exxon donate a few million dollars to a sketchy ‘reforestation charity’ and claim to be carbon-neutral? I imagine this research is out there, but the people interested in Wall Street tend to be a different set than those interested in climate, labor rights, or political freedom.

I like the die-grinder microphone. Sets the tone for the rest of the presentation.

When I was young and naive, I figured I should be able to buy a tool or jig, take it out of the box, and use it. The longer I play, the more I realize almost all of those things benefit by some hand tuning. This is a great example.

Don’t be afraid to scratch alignment marks or drill holes in that expensive new tool. It’s yours, and you know better how you work than some engineer in Indianapolis.

I think OP is talking about a single building with single-family occupancy and commercial storefront. At least in the US, a lot of single-family residential zones exclude commercial use.

Average spending is not a good metric for addictive behaviors - spending/consumption tends to be extremely concentrated in a small fraction. My go-to example for this is alcohol where, in the US, 10 drinks/week is the population average, but also enough to get you into the “top 10%” or “heavy drinker” bin, where the average consumption of that bin is 74 drinks/week. In both alcohol and gacha, a huge fraction of the population don’t pay anything.

I mean, even if the article’s $30/month average spend is entirely within their 20% “problem” spenders, it would only be $150, but it’s a little easier (for me) to see where $150/month gacha habit could be a problem for young people already on the financial edge. Not the fundamental problem that skyrocketing rent and stagnant wages are, but more in the last-straw sense.

That’s income, though, not net worth. Imagine you’ve got $250k in your 401k and you spent $250.

That penetration is super exaggerated. Ever cut through a stained (i.e. pigment-stained) board? Board painted with a water-based paint? Those paint pigment particles are same scale as microbes, so you should expect them to penetrate to similar depth. Surface cleaning and routine abrasion get rid of most of it. Go over the surface with a scraper - take off 20-50 microns - and you’re pretty much down to virgin wood.

I mean, if you’re starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.

It’s definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.

These were the “good old days” when fighting had rules. National armies would literally line up facing each other in uniforms with literal X-marks-the-spot targets.