It’s worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn’t much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.
Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.
In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.
Totally agree. Income isn’t wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of “millionaire” when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn’t even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly “six figures” income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.
I’ve seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you’re rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don’t have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.
Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with “wealth” may not have to work at all.
People don’t become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn’t really classify as normal income.
Edit: It’s like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it’s not classified as income. Meanwhile you’re going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don’t or can’t tax wealth.
Edit2: we’ve got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you’re not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.
I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.
One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.
Another point I’d like to sneak in is that there’s almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today’s equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn’t working the way we expect. The same opportunities don’t exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.
Edit: and it’s not just houses, it’s the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.
That’s the issue I have with the justice system - it’s much too loose with facts because it’s designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn’t have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn’t in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you’re right in the eyes of the law. It’s bullshit.
Edit: if you’re a physician on trial for malpractice, “A jury of your peers” would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don’t operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.
That’s a good way to put it - it’s laziness. Maybe it’s laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can’t be modernized with society. I’m not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.
I’ve heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there’s no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they’re on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.
That’s what I’m talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.
I don’t mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?
It’s not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who “just know” that that MMR vaccine caused their son’s autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage “must have” caused his cancer - because it’s less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn’t do anything to cause it.
Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.
Believe me when I say I’m not on corporations’ side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.
PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it’s not my field and I haven’t looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I’ve seen firsthand the family’s emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.
Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005....
Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn’t be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying “how do we prevent population contraction” - that’s insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.
If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we’re all fucked.
Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn’t have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can’t.
It’s approved as of last fall, but the FAA spent well over a decade stonewalling it with unnecessary bureaucracy.
Now we’re left with the chicken-and-egg problem of the market, where nobody will offer unleaded because it’s more expensive, but it’s expensive because it’s not widely used. The feds should subsidize it down to $4/gal for 5 years to get it off the ground.
That was a great watch - it’s cool to find out the history.
I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).
I’m not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it’s so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don’t think that’s a very popular opinion.
Whatever your views on it, it’s the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.
I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you’re making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I’m experiencing the “real thing” based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that’s what you seem to have implied.
I agree that we probably don’t have a common definition of good or bad transit.
I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.
And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.
I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it’s worth making this point: “NIMBY” as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:
There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into “low cost housing” or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.
These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don’t like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.
Do you oppose development? NIMBY!
Do you support development? NIMBY!
Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.
I think it’s bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I’m sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a “NIMBY”, I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.
Rich People Are the Big Barrier to Stabilizing the Climate (newrepublic.com)
Archived copy of the article
‘Forever chemical’ bans face hard truth: Many can’t be replaced (www.japantimes.co.jp)
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of 'forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back, saying there often is no substitute.
Buying a new car is not better than keeping an old one (lemmy.world)
Ex-Americans are suing America to get back some of the money they paid to renounce their citizenship (www.insider.com)
A Lab Test That Experts Liken to a Witch Trial Is Helping Send Women to Prison for Murder (www.propublica.org)
Senator Calls for DOJ Action Against Philips for Keeping CPAP Machine Complaints Secret (www.propublica.org)
Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing) (nationalpost.com)
Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005....
New cars are great... (sopuli.xyz)
Why do apps reload constantly?
Android user for several years, many versions, now on 13 with a Pixel 5....
An "airport neighbourhood" where people can store their planes in their yard and taxi directly to the runway (lemmy.ml)
Location on a map: www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=42.1486108&mlon=-…
this is all (lemmy.world)
[meme] How would you rather see this land developed? (lemmy.world)