WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on To be happy… 9 hours ago:
When talking about air fryers, my husband once rightly pointed out that air fryers are just countertop convection ovens.
I walked over to him, held my index finger up to his lips, and said to hmm, “shhh. Air fryer. AIR FRYER.” 🤣
- Comment on A reminder 2 days ago:
I will not even dignify your overt racism with a response.
- Comment on A reminder 6 days ago:
Thanks. Blocked and moved on.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Oh, you’re just a racist garbage person. Xenophobia does not become OK simply because the target are Americans.
Well, if I guess if I’m irredeemably evil simply because of where I happened to be born, then you have no room to complain. I’m just doing what I was born to do, apparently. I’ll disregard your words, because they’re irrelevant to an evil monster like myself.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Sure. But I think the seven year figure is how often people “on average” move, not just how often people sell and buy new homes.
- Comment on Anon meets the candy man 1 week ago:
Either way there’s some odd moral implications…
Aka, it’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
- Comment on Anon meets the candy man 1 week ago:
The shop keeper is just prejudiced. Charlie’s four grandparents are in a long-term polycule together. Charlie is the result of an insane two-generation long plan to get all members of the polycule to have a single genetic child together. The polycule has been completely open to the whole town about this plan, and everyone knows it.
The shopkeeper isn’t prejudiced against the poor. He just has sexual hangups. And he’s projecting his bigotry onto an innocent young child that had no choice but to be part of this whole situation.
- Comment on The good old days 1 week ago:
Tell her that most girls lose their cartwheel magic as they get older. Encourage her to keep it up and to not ever be afraid to do one!
- Comment on The good old days 1 week ago:
I certainly wouldn’t put it past home depot to hire elementary school kids!
- Comment on Experimental Build Of Nvidia’s DLSS 5 AI Slop Filter Leaks And Turns Beloved Video Game Characters Into Uncanny Valley Weirdos 1 week ago:
Most people who breathe are good people. Most people running the big AI companies are not. That is the difference.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
I was shocked to learn that the average homeowner in the US lives in their house for only 7 years.
I wonder how much of this is a question of what average is being used. It’s the old median vs mean problem.
Elon Musk and a hundred homeless people are in a room. By the mean, the average person in that room is a billionaire. By the median, the average person is homeless.
I’m really curious whether that 7 year average figure is based on the median or mean. Because I could see it being really skewed by young people in their twenties that move around a lot.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
You can have whatever definition you want. But for me, working class means just that - a person that has earned their bread through the work of their own hands, not through the exploitation of the labor of others, through rent-seeking, or from inheritance.
I’m sure you can cite plenty of theory, but frankly, I don’t care. I prefer a definition of the term centered in lived experience. If you go off raw wealth, you just end up classifying entire nations as working class or bourgeois, at which point the term loses all meaning.
- Comment on Experimental Build Of Nvidia’s DLSS 5 AI Slop Filter Leaks And Turns Beloved Video Game Characters Into Uncanny Valley Weirdos 1 week ago:
You’re ignoring that the real problem is that when AI is concerned, tech companies have demonstrated that they have a rapist’s understanding of consent.
- Comment on What is the best and worst USA state to live in? And why? 1 week ago:
Don’t forget the cost of losing civil rights.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Petit bourgeois? Our money is all in our house and in retirement assets that are just America’s poor excuse for a pension system. If we’re petit bourgeois, so is every retired school teacher that’s worked long enough to earn a pension.
Petit bourgeois refers to people that have to work but also control their own means of production. Classically this meant artisans, tradesmen, shop owners, etc. People who aren’t having their labor exploited, but also still have to work.
In our careers, we’ve almost always worked regular salary jobs. We’re not immune to job loss. We do not own the means of production. We’ve had our labor surplus siphoned off by employers our whole careers.
That’s the whole point of this discussion. Even most millionaires are just working class people trying to achieve a little bit of stability in their lives.
- Comment on A reminder 1 week ago:
Seriously. My partner and I are millionaires. We’re almost 40 and have a net worth just shy of $2M. We’ve a couple of DINKS. We’re both engineers, are pretty good with numbers, and understand compound interest. We got on the property ladder pretty early. I bought my first townhouse in 2012 pretty much right at the bottom of the housing market. We’ve moved twice since then and have benefited from the full rise in house prices.
Our net worth is a little under $2M. About $10k of that is checking and savings. Another $80k in a taxable brokerage account as an emergency fund. $450k in home equity. The rest is in retirement accounts such as 401ks and IRAs.
We are working class. The closest either of us have ever come to hiring someone is when we’ve hired a plumber or electrician to fix something at our home. I’ve technically owned a business, but just for my own freelance tutoring work. And the closest either of us have ever come to being a landlord was when I had a couple of roommates at that first townhouse I bought.
We’re doing very well; we have no complaints. And while we’ve achieved some modest amount of wealth, it’s not ultimately about living large or in luxury. We live well below our means. We recently bought the first new car in a quite awhile, a Toyota Corolla. It replaced a 15 year old Corolla that my partner bought new. We buy affordable reliable vehicles and drive them til the wheels fall off.
But again, we’re not trying to get rich. We’re not trying to hoard the largest possible of money we can. We don’t view wealth as a lifetime high score. It’s simply a means to achieve stability and safety. We’re on the path to early retirement. We hope to retire by the time we’re 50. We need to save up a couple of million not because we want to live in luxury, but simply because it’s the only way to have a decent stable and safe retirement in this capitalist hellscape we live in. In a world with universal healthcare and a universal basic income, we would have no need for millions in retirement savings. If my partner and I each brought in say, $20k a year from UBI? If we had a paid off house and also didn’t have to worry about healthcare? We could live quite well off just that $40k per year.
I’m a millionaire and I support much higher taxes on millionaires. I do this because ultimately the point for us for having a couple of million is not to have a couple of million. The point is to have safety and stability in our lives. And the secure the social safety net, the less the need to cover those needs privately.
- Comment on This isn't fair 1 week ago:
I hope you have access to a supply of liquid nitrogen…
- Comment on It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire. 3 weeks ago:
All I’m saying is government at all levels today does a hell of a lot more than governments did in the 19th century. We simply ask more from our governments than we used to. And the more a government does, the more legislation will be necessary.
- Comment on It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire. 3 weeks ago:
The difference is that in ye olden days there was simply much less need for full time legislators. In an era where 90% of the population lived on largely self-sufficient family farms, and large scale economic regulation wasn’t widespread, part time legislators made a lot more sense.
- Comment on It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire. 3 weeks ago:
Anyone have a link to the actual disclosure document? This doesn’t seem to pass the smell test. She’s making a salary of $174k per year and has been in Congress for 7 years. I wonder if this excludes retirement accounts like 401ks and IRAs. That would make sense. But I would expect her to have at least $100k in a retirement account by now. I mean she did go from working as a bartender to being a member of Congress. That kind of jump in pay usually lets one really up their retirement savings at least.
- Comment on Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, it is actually very difficult to manage. It’s called the two-income trap for a reason. But my partner and I do this. We at least try to keep our mandatory expenses under one income. If we have a long duration job loss and savings aren’t enough, we can at least cover our basics - mortgage, food, property taxes, health insurance, etc. off one income. That might require pausing all retirement savings, cutting out all eating out and any subscription services, and not traveling anywhere. But we try to at least keep our bare survival expenses below either of our incomes.
And we’ve just planned our life around this. For example, we could easily afford a much nicer house than we currently have…if we were willing to be dependent on both our incomes to cover the mortgage. But then you’re in trouble if either of you loses a job. Instead of providing stability, the extra income actually compounds your risk!
I know many, perhaps most, people can’t do this even with great frugality. But if you can manage to do it, it is a life hack that brings such an incredible amount of peace, stability, and safety to your life that, to me at least, no fancier home could ever be worth giving up that safety to obtain.
- Comment on No amount of groveling will be enough for the nepo baby wing of the Democratic Party. They should just become Republicans. 3 weeks ago:
It’s also the obvious problem with equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism. If you make the Jewish identity inseparable from the Israeli nation, then every Jewish person becomes morally culpable for Israel’s actions.
- Comment on is it weird to have your own religious beliefs system 3 weeks ago:
You’re referring to Syncretism, and it’s extremely common in the Western world. 25% of American Christians report believing in reincarnation.
- Comment on Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps. 3 weeks ago:
It’s honestly one of the best benefits of marriage if you can manage it. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to keep your mandatory expenses below either of your individual incomes, you both gain tremendous leverage against employers. There is no more powerful negotiating tool than having the ability to walk away.
- Comment on Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps. 3 weeks ago:
Seriously. I’m someone that’s had a background in engineering but has really struggled in office jobs due to what I now know to be AuDHD related. I’m currently exploring a mid career transition to K12 teaching. I’ve had prior experience in education, just not K12 classroom teaching. But I have real reason to believe this would work a lot better with my neurology.
But frankly, the only reason I’m able to explore this is because I have a partner, and we’re fortunate enough to be able to get by on their income alone. We both need to be working for us to really make progress on our savings and retirement goals, and I owe it to them to do all I can to pull my own weight. So I can just not work. But I have the luxury of being able to try to find work that works for me.
With as rocky as a career history as I have had? If I hadn’t been with my partner, I would have probably had to make a living on my back or end up living on the street. I certainly never would have had the luxury of being able to take the time to explore alternate career paths. It’s that bad.
I have struggled with very real career impediments from this. And having a bit of money has made all the difference. We’re not rich. But just having enough to have a stable home situation and the ability to afford treatment is life changing.
- Comment on Money doesn't solve everything, but it helps. 3 weeks ago:
We’re not talking about printing money and giving it away. We’re talking about taxing and spending. This doesn’t cause inflation as resources are devoted from the pet projects of the wealthy to the needs of ordinary people.
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 4 weeks ago:
You’re dancing around my core question.
I’m talking about the past, not the future. I’m specifically asking about the past. I don’t want to hear about all the great things China promises to do. I want to know why they chose to create billionaires. I want to know why China is the way it is now. I don’t want to hear glittering promises about what it will become.
I ask you again. Why the billionaires? Why did a nominally socialist country not design its market economy (which it built from scratch) to be more equitable from the start?
I’m not talking about what China may change into. I’m asking why they didn’t plan this from the start. The CCP has in its ranks literally millions of people formally educated in the theories of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and others. They know class struggle and the inevitable outcomes of unregulated capitalism. It’s not like they couldn’t easily predict that a market economy would lead to billionaires. If anyone could be expected to design their market economy in an equitable way, it’s the CCP. And there wasn’t a class of wealthy businessmen that took over the government and forced them to adopt these economic policies. They created their market economy from scratch; they could have built it on a worker co-op model. They CHOSE the current model.
China’s existing market economy did not evolve spontaneously. The old pre-Communist market economy was destroyed in the Revolution and during the Mao era. China’s billionaires aren’t just the wealthy inheritors of Qing-era nobles. They’re all new money; they made their fortunes in the economy Deng and others created. The post-Mao leaders of China created a market economy from scratch, and they could have made it any way they wanted. They chose a model that allows for billionaires.
I want to know why they made that choice. Why didn’t Deng and others build the new Chinese market economy with hard wealth caps or around worker-owned co-ops?
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 4 weeks ago:
I’m not really asking about capital circulation. I’m interested specifically in the billionaires. So why the billionaires?
I can understand the logic of having a market-based economy. It’s a very effective means of achieving compound economic growth. But a market economy does not require billionaires. There are numerous more equitable models that China could have built its system around. For example, they could have built their market economy based entirely around worker-owned co-ops. Co-ops can compete just fine in markets. Or, they could have gone with the current structure, but put in place a wealth cap. That’s been proposed before even in the US.
Why couldn’t China build a market economy, but just have a hard rule of “no one is allowed to amass more than X amount?” Even if people couldn’t hoard more than say, $100 million, that still gives people plenty of incentive to start new businesses, get an education, work hard, etc.
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 4 weeks ago:
You linked a source repeating your earlier claim about the raw number of people lifted out of poverty. Again, I ask, what about per-capita income?
This is a ridiculous comparison. Taiwan received substantial foreign aid from the US because of it’s strategic value against the mainland, while the PRC was subject to a massive economic embargo.
China received extensive aid from the USSR.
That… what? I don’t follow what you’re saying here at all.
Do you understand what “per capita” means? It would be far more impressive for a country of one million people to lift 950,000 people out of poverty than for a nation of 1 billion people to lift 800 million people out of poverty.
It’s much easier for a small country to modernize in a short period of time, especially with outside help. It’s very difficult to reach all the people in all the rural areas of China, it means more infrastructure has to be built, more people have to be educated, etc.
Why? I see no reason for this. Larger countries have more resources. Everything you need to lift people out of poverty scales with population. If anything, it’s actually EASIER for large countries to lift themselves out of poverty. A tiny micro-nation with a population of 10,000 isn’t going to be building an aircraft factory. There’s a lot of minimum-size requirements on certain national infrastructure. If anything, the bigger, the easier it is to modernize. Yes, the larger population creates greater needs, but you also have more people to address those needs.
And China was not unique in having disconnected rural populations. Small countries and big countries both have isolated rural areas.
I don’t agree that per-capita is the relevent statistic for the above reasons.
It’s the only meaningful way to compare countries. Otherwise you just end up making brain-dead conclusions like, “the big country has the big number. Therefore it’s better.”
- Comment on Why does China have so many multi billionaires if they are aiming to be a communist country? 4 weeks ago:
Why the billionaires though? Sure, you can argue that China needed to adopt a largely market-based economy in order to grow its economic base. But a market economy does not require billionaires. Why couldn’t China do exactly what it’s doing now with worker-owned cooperatives? Why does there have to be one rich guy at the top hoarding all the money?
What’s stopping China right now from instituting a maximum wealth cap?