Real life thread

[quantumlight]

It is depressing to think about but we are all cogs in the system. From birth until 18 we are dependant on parent and controlled by them, and typically its not until after 24 that we find first job and earn own money... Biologically the human body starts to adversely age past age 20, and for females the reproductive peak is 24 whilst for a guy his prime is around 30. Even from a career or professional standpoint, 40 is the peak and after 50 its all downhill from there quite rapidly.

So if we take 45 and subtract from 24, thats really only barely two decades of usable time. Considering the average guy works at least 40 hours a week and when you subtract the time used for sleeping, eating, chores, self or career improvement then really there is only a couple hours a week left over on the weekend thats actually "free time"...

Plus, most jobs offer what 3 weeks PTO a year? After subtracting for the unplanned contigencies thats barely enough for 2 week vacation a year...
So we are talking about 10 days out of 365...

Between paying taxes, putting aside for retirement 401k, ira, and having to buy mandatory health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, property taxes, this that and the other, most Americans barely manage to put aside enough spare funda to go on one vacation a year

99% of life is wasted doing mindless toiling under the sun and we truly only live for ourselves maybe only 1% of our entire useful lifespan...

This ratio sucks, its the ultimate reminder that we are but slaves in the system

 

[AndrewS]

It is depressing to think about but we are all cogs in the system. From birth until 18 we are dependant on parent and controlled by them, and typically its not until after 24 that we find first job and earn own money... Biologically the human body starts to adversely age past age 20, and for females the reproductive peak is 24 whilst for a guy his prime is around 30. Even from a career or professional standpoint, 40 is the peak and after 50 its all downhill from there quite rapidly.

So if we take 45 and subtract from 24, thats really only barely two decades of usable time. Considering the average guy works at least 40 hours a week and when you subtract the time used for sleeping, eating, chores, self or career improvement then really there is only a couple hours a week left over on the weekend thats actually "free time"...

Plus, most jobs offer what 3 weeks PTO a year? After subtracting for the unplanned contigencies thats barely enough for 2 week vacation a year...
So we are talking about 10 days out of 365...

Between paying taxes, putting aside for retirement 401k, ira, and having to buy mandatory health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, property taxes, this that and the other, most Americans barely manage to put aside enough spare funda to go on one vacation a year

99% of life is wasted doing mindless toiling under the sun and we truly only live for ourselves maybe only 1% of our entire useful lifespan...

This ratio sucks, its the ultimate reminder that we are but slaves in the system

Those are valid complaints in the USA.
The most effective solution would be to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour.

Note that the major Western European countries have a minimum wage of $13+ per hour, which is almost twice as much.

You get higher living standards for most of the population and fewer working hours because labour is more expensive.
The studies indicate that overall "happiness" levels should increase.
The overall economy should grow larger as well, because lower-income earners tend to spend more of what they earn.

---
Plus if you don't want to be a cog in the system, there is always the option of starting up on your own.

 

[quantumlight]

Those are valid complaints in the USA.
The most effective solution would be to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour.

Note that the major Western European countries have a minimum wage of $13+ per hour, which is almost twice as much.

You get higher living standards for most of the population and fewer working hours because labour is more expensive.
The studies indicate that overall "happiness" levels should increase.
The overall economy should grow larger as well, because lower-income earners tend to spend more of what they earn.

---
Plus if you don't want to be a cog in the system, there is always the option of starting up on your own.

What I wrote above is geared towards average American salary range and is true even in low six figures.... nothing about minimum wage jobs.

Most gigs paying 7.25/hr are part time (35 hours or less) so companies dont have to pay insurance. I never heard of minimum wage offering 401k, ira, and you can forget about 3 weeks PTO

Working a minimum wage job as sole income one would never be able to afford a two weeks overseas trip or vacation a year.

90% of all small businesses fail in America within first 5 years. Working for yourself is very risky and often requires significant upfront investment that most people dont have, both in terms of capital and years of toiling in terms of time investment outlays and no guarantee of any success nor stability... in fact America small business "you too can climb the class ladder, win the lottery, and be rich" is probably more of a scam to keep the cog running than the standard typical job scheme, the individual absorbs the risk to buy the raffle ticket with a tiny chance of winning the success lottery

Have you taken a look at small business outlook in the USA? America dream is over dude

 

[quantumlight]

Thats not to say China's 996 isnt even less of a "life" but I can only firsthand talk about what I know through experience.

It just strikes me as odd that my first ever job at age 16 bagging groceries at our local Kroger paid me $5.15 /hr and yet here we are almost 20 years later the min wage Federally is still $7.25/hr

Im making around low six figure mark salary nowadays but I swear my standard of living feels more or less the same as opposed to when I was barely making half that around a decade ago

It sure seems between the rush to grow up and the need to save for retirement, there is very few years inbetween during ones prime reserved for actual living instead of going through the motions of one means to an end to another

A increase in min wage like Andrew proposed would kill many small businesses already teetering on the seams and cash strapped, further consolidating the central power of the large too big to fail conglomerates...

Even if you are making a decent salary, say slightly upper middle class, maybe 20 percentile, basically half of everything goes to the tax man or insurance man and what you have left over you are encourage by societal norms to """invest"""" cough cough cough it for "retirement"

And Im not even talking about young working folks with kids, daycare expenses, saving for their college (higher education is another massive scam bubble rising 3x the inflation rate but thats a whole other story)

As a kid I distinctively recall cashier was a viable job, you could straight out of high school or GED get a cashier job and buy a house or car and raise a small family with that

Nowadays people making 6 figures on paper are living paycheck to paycheck and struggle to save up for a single vacation a year. Flights to Australia in economy are now $10000

You know how long a gig worker in US has to toil to save up $10000?

America is land of the Premier Mediocre and home of the Basic Economy

 

[AndrewS]

What I wrote above is geared towards average American salary range and is true even in low six figures.... nothing about minimum wage jobs.

Most gigs paying 7.25/hr are part time (35 hours or less) so companies dont have to pay insurance. I never heard of minimum wage offering 401k, ira, and you can forget about 3 weeks PTO

Working a minimum wage job as sole income one would never be able to afford a two weeks overseas trip or vacation a year.

90% of all small businesses fail in America within first 5 years. Working for yourself is very risky and often requires significant upfront investment that most people dont have, both in terms of capital and years of toiling in terms of time investment outlays and no guarantee of any success nor stability... in fact America small business "you too can climb the class ladder, win the lottery, and be rich" is probably more of a scam to keep the cog running than the standard typical job scheme, the individual absorbs the risk to buy the raffle ticket with a tiny chance of winning the success lottery

Have you taken a look at small business outlook in the USA? America dream is over dude

Think about what will happen if the minimum wage were to be increased to at least $13 per hour like in Western Europe.

Yes, prices for many good and services would increase. But that would affect both small and large business equally.

The net result is that wages would account for a larger proportion on sales. And remember that overall demand remains the same in the economy. So the net result is a large transfer from corporate profits to wages.

As for holidays, an increase in minimum wage from 7.25 to 13 USD per hour works out as roughly $13000 per year. A modest 2week holiday costs $2000 in total?

Or perhaps that money could be saved and provide capital for a new business?

And if the minimum wage is $13, that's a useful safety net.

 

[quantumlight]

Another aspect is asset price inflation.

You can see other countries like China, UK or Australia discourage

It all comes back to "Peak Oil"... we haven't left the oil industry in fact most of the so-called renewables are derivatives of oil in that they require a preexisting oil infrastructure to be stood up and maintained in the first place.

If you look at modern financial and economic systems and things like fractional reserve banking, quantitative easing, the concept of interest rates and debt=money creation, etc then its obvious that the modern system depends on ever increasingly supplies of cheap, abundant AND higher EROEI energy sources, and frankly even if we could instantly covert to 100% renewables overnight, it still would come at the cost of bankrupting much of the globalized world that is solely dependant upon the sort of cheap credit afforded to us by petroleum and hydrocarbons... the top crude low sulfer sweet oil stuff... the energy ratio just isn't the same, not to mention this is a best case and the world right now is well less than 10% total renewables and with oil production in massive decline with nothing else like fusion or fast breeders or zero-point-energy on the horizon (the next immediate ten years) to pick up the slack..

What's a sure sign of collapse and cannibalization? Having money on paper but increasingly not being able to buy anything and things getting more expensive... also no society has ever been able to legislate nor print its way to wealth or riches... there is no cheating the second lawy of thermodynamics and the energy/entropy equations...

Back in 2014 I bought a then top of the line state of the art flagship Nvidia GPU graphics card for $599 at Frys electronics (GTX980) and that was the very high end of that era. CPU has not been improving at Moores laws rates since at least the early 2010... and only GPU was barely able to catch up or stay in line with the Moores law doubling.... but the price and power ratios have not been kept constant, the top of line GPU today from Nvidia costs about three times as much (if you can even find them), at the shelves at Fry's were barren/empty until recently Fry's itself went lights out and belly up... Not to mention the top graphics cards these days use a lot more power watts and so not only has it hit Dennard scaling issues but also economic issues (price skyrocketing) not to mention supply/inventory issues (even at inflated prices the last couple of Nvidia GPU launches have been paper launches with near zero inventory and one can only grab it on craiglists from scaplers for like $2299 for what used to be just $599 half a decade ago)....

So you say well this is in part due to the bitcoin craze or work from home? Well first off using GPU to mine bitcoins hasn't been profitable since around 2013, and there are dedicated ASIC miners specifically for the job, and while COVID has force a lot of work from home, the vast majority of the employees don't need a dedicate GPU for their work, and besides that couldn't explain why GPUs are now more power hungry than ever irrespective of costs...

Take joysticks for example, many years ago I bought a Thrustmaster Hotas combo for $45, now the same on amazon (when available) is over $100+, even more on ebay. Higher end joysticks have been inflated even more in price, and what used to cost $150 is now like $450... trust me the vast majority of people do not need a joystick to work at home... so the pundits blame it on the fact that Microsoft came out with the new Flight Simulator 2020, except Flight Simulator franchise has exists longer than Windows itself and it never caused a joystick shortage every other time there was a new version of Flight Simulator before!

I talked about recently upgrading late last year from Intel i7-4790k (from 2014) to a much newer Intel i9-9900k (eight cores, 16 threads) which affords me using the newer motherboard chipset that lets me go up to 128GB system memory compared to my cap of 32GB when on the older CPU. But in terms of performance benchmarks, it gave me overall on average maybe 3% framerate boost. Sure most games are GPU bound these days and CPU is not the bottleneck but even for non-gaming applications its not been following Moores Law for a long time now... only other option I looked at was getting the top AMD Threadripper with 32 cores, exciting but still not keeping up with Moores law in terms of performance and the price is 6x jump... the 32core Threadripper costs $2000 just for the CPU alone, just the one chip, nothing else.... so a computer build these days would end up costing several times what it used to cost, which is ironic since traditionally computers and electronics were one area in which costs only lowered over time, but even inflation is hitting electronics now too... and this cannot be blamed on the TSMC chip shortage because TSMC doesn't make Intel or desktop CPU chips...

 

[PiSigma]

Thats not to say China's 996 isnt even less of a "life" but I can only firsthand talk about what I know through experience.

It just strikes me as odd that my first ever job at age 16 bagging groceries at our local Kroger paid me $5.15 /hr and yet here we are almost 20 years later the min wage Federally is still $7.25/hr

Im making around low six figure mark salary nowadays but I swear my standard of living feels more or less the same as opposed to when I was barely making half that around a decade ago

It sure seems between the rush to grow up and the need to save for retirement, there is very few years inbetween during ones prime reserved for actual living instead of going through the motions of one means to an end to another

A increase in min wage like Andrew proposed would kill many small businesses already teetering on the seams and cash strapped, further consolidating the central power of the large too big to fail conglomerates...

Even if you are making a decent salary, say slightly upper middle class, maybe 20 percentile, basically half of everything goes to the tax man or insurance man and what you have left over you are encourage by societal norms to """invest"""" cough cough cough it for "retirement"

And Im not even talking about young working folks with kids, daycare expenses, saving for their college (higher education is another massive scam bubble rising 3x the inflation rate but thats a whole other story)

As a kid I distinctively recall cashier was a viable job, you could straight out of high school or GED get a cashier job and buy a house or car and raise a small family with that

Nowadays people making 6 figures on paper are living paycheck to paycheck and struggle to save up for a single vacation a year. Flights to Australia in economy are now $10000

You know how long a gig worker in US has to toil to save up $10000?

America is land of the Premier Mediocre and home of the Basic Economy

There haven't been growth in the standard of living for 80%+ of the American or Canadian population for 30 years.

Your salary increases are meeting inflation at most, but inflation is artificially kept low on paper but higher in reality, thus you are making less over time.

When I started working at 15 (at a subway as a sandwich artist lol) I made $5.50/hour, minimum wage in Alberta at the time. The minimum wage now is $15 now.

When I graduated in 2007, I made $60k/yr and damn that felt like a lot of money then. Now my coop student makes almost $80k/year!!

 

[B.I.B.]

Think about what will happen if the minimum wage were to be increased to at least $13 per hour like in Western Europe.

Yes, prices for many good and services would increase. But that would affect both small and large business equally.

The net result is that wages would account for a larger proportion on sales. And remember that overall demand remains the same in the economy. So the net result is a large transfer from corporate profits to wages.

As for holidays, an increase in minimum wage from 7.25 to 13 USD per hour works out as roughly $13000 per year. A modest 2week holiday costs $2000 in total?

Or perhaps that money could be saved and provide capital for a new business?

And if the minimum wage is $13, that's a useful safety net.

In NZ the minimum wage is $18.90 and is set to rise to $20 next month. We also have a living wage of $22 paid by some local govt/council and employers. However when one compares NZ to the U.S. using the MacDonalds chart, we are no better off than the folks in the U.S. on a minimum wage.

 

[quantumlight]

In NZ the minimum wage is $18.90 and is set to rise to $20 next month. We also have a living wage of $22 paid by some local govt/council and employers. However when one compares NZ to the U.S. using the MacDonalds chart, we are no better off than the folks in the U.S. on a minimum wage.

Exactly, no funny money can change the thermodynamic reality on the ground, (wealth is predicated on energy, high density energy and lots of it )any more than Jai Hind propaganda can change the power dynamic between India and China

 

[FriedRiceNSpice]

Thats not to say China's 996 isnt even less of a "life" but I can only firsthand talk about what I know through experience.

It just strikes me as odd that my first ever job at age 16 bagging groceries at our local Kroger paid me $5.15 /hr and yet here we are almost 20 years later the min wage Federally is still $7.25/hr

Im making around low six figure mark salary nowadays but I swear my standard of living feels more or less the same as opposed to when I was barely making half that around a decade ago

It sure seems between the rush to grow up and the need to save for retirement, there is very few years inbetween during ones prime reserved for actual living instead of going through the motions of one means to an end to another

A increase in min wage like Andrew proposed would kill many small businesses already teetering on the seams and cash strapped, further consolidating the central power of the large too big to fail conglomerates...

Even if you are making a decent salary, say slightly upper middle class, maybe 20 percentile, basically half of everything goes to the tax man or insurance man and what you have left over you are encourage by societal norms to """invest"""" cough cough cough it for "retirement"

And Im not even talking about young working folks with kids, daycare expenses, saving for their college (higher education is another massive scam bubble rising 3x the inflation rate but thats a whole other story)

As a kid I distinctively recall cashier was a viable job, you could straight out of high school or GED get a cashier job and buy a house or car and raise a small family with that

Nowadays people making 6 figures on paper are living paycheck to paycheck and struggle to save up for a single vacation a year. Flights to Australia in economy are now $10000

You know how long a gig worker in US has to toil to save up $10000?

America is land of the Premier Mediocre and home of the Basic Economy

People are limited by their mindsets. If making a low six figure income is not enough for the desired standard of living, then look to earn much more rather than be held back by artificial limitations. In most places in the US, a six figure income is more than enough for a very comfortable standard of living. The reason it is not enough in some cities is because there are a lot of people making much more than that in those cities. By choosing where to live along with occupation, there is nothing stopping anyone from achieving a comfortable standard of living in the US.

Inflation is real, but it is also uneven - it affects different localities and income strata differently. Pre 2012, people had the belief that a six figure income was what was required to enjoy a high standard of living. Since then, the bar has raised, and in the more expensive cities, that figure is now about a quarter million.