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ToxicSlurpee posted:When I was job hunting after college there were people who kept telling me to just beat the pavement and keep putting in paper applications everywhere you could find. I just looked at them with the most annoyed expression I could muster before just telling them I was sending applications and resumes out through the internet as that's how it's done now. Any place that you can actually still apply to in person points you at a kiosk that just goes to that website in the end. Paper applications are a thing of the past and, guess what, it isnt 1973 anymore. I understand your concern and can relate as I have been required to sign up for sites like that, which I never used because it was basically all posts searching nursing jobs and CDL drivers, but I think that there is a fair bit of difference between "impractical way to punish the poor and disenfranchised" and "open-to-everyone centralised source of employment information that combats information asymmetry."
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Sep 24, 2018 18:46
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:Be wary of this argument. Usual old appliances are worse, especiall for efficient use of resource. There is also the bias of survivorship, when you have 50 year old refrigerator that is working, you just see it worked for 50 year, without seeing the other 100 fridge built at same factory of same model on the same day that went into landfill many years prior. Cars have gone up in reliability almost every year for decades and also every year for decades every survey has people estimating cars are going down in reliability. People like the idea things are getting worse even if stuff legitimately measurably isn't.
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Sep 24, 2018 18:52
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By every single reasonable metric, average standard of living has gone up in the United States for the last 50 years. Even for people in the bottom 20%. Admitting that things are better for the average person is not conceding that everything is perfect or saying that nothing needs to fixed. Even with healthcare and education significantly outpacing wages, the decrease in costs for almost everything else and the increase in wages means that the average person in the U.S. has more disposable income at the end of the day after they pay for food, housing, education, healthcare, transportation, and clothing than they did in the "golden age" of the 1950's. Inflation-adjusted median household income, median disposable income, and employment are all at or near record levels this year. That doesn't even include the non-monetary things like the incredible access to information or "black people can live in a neighborhood with white people" that have improved the lives of the bottom quintile. 
Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 19:26
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Cars have gone up in reliability almost every year for decades and also every year for decades every survey has people estimating cars are going down in reliability. People like the idea things are getting worse even if stuff legitimately measurably isn't. Try explaining that to someone that feels very strongly that their anecdotes are as relevant as data. I would say old people continue to be the worst but I've seen plenty of people my age and younger trot out the "they keep making things worse and worse so you have to buy more" argument.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:28
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Cars have gone up in reliability almost every year for decades and also every year for decades every survey has people estimating cars are going down in reliability. People like the idea things are getting worse even if stuff legitimately measurably isn't. Your TV breaks. In the past you called Joe the electrician who lives three blocks away, and he’d come and fix your TV. If it was a really common and tedious-but-easy repair he might even tell you how to do it yourself to avoid wasting time on barely- profitable repair jobs. Hence, your TV was “reliable” in that it would last 20 years as long as you did minor repairs every six months as it got older. Nowadays Joe is retired and new TVs can’t be easily repaired with a $10 drainpipe soldering iron and replacement capacitors large enough that you can still replace them after having had ten beers. So even though a modern TV might only fail once every three years it feels unreliable because if it fails you either ship it back to the manufacturer and have to wait two months to get it back or you just end up buying a new one because chances are it’s uneconomical to pay the manufacturer’s repair rates for a cheap consumer TV. e: You could probably still replace one $1 failed component on a PCB somewhere or just buy the PCB for $50 from a replacement part stockist, but typical consumers like you don’t know what to replace and where to buy the spare part unless they tinker with electronics as a hobby. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 19:31
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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DrNutt posted:Try explaining that to someone that feels very strongly that their anecdotes are as relevant as data. I would say old people continue to be the worst but I've seen plenty of people my age and younger trot out the "they keep making things worse and worse so you have to buy more" argument. Of course, all other things being equal, everyone would prefer more reliable stuff. But all other things aren't equal. The repairability example is a good one, smartphones and TV's aren't very repairable because it's hard to do that while also making them very thin and (reasonably) inexpensive and other traits that people actually base their purchasing decision on. Almost nobody is like, "I know, I wanna get my next phone from the most reliable manufacturer".
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Sep 24, 2018 19:35
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Cicero posted:Of course, all other things being equal, everyone would prefer more reliable stuff. But all other things aren't equal. The repairability example is a good one, smartphones and TV's aren't very repairable because it's hard to do that while also making them very thin and (reasonably) inexpensive and other traits that people actually base their purchasing decision on. Almost nobody is like, "I know, I wanna get my next phone from the most reliable manufacturer". Apart from battery life issues, I have owned exactly two pieces of technology that have had any sort of actual equipment failure during their useful lives. Maybe I'm just very lucky, but I get the feeling that most gadgets are already sufficiently reliable.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:41
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PT6A posted:Apart from battery life issues, I have owned exactly two pieces of technology that have had any sort of actual equipment failure during their useful lives. Maybe I'm just very lucky, but I get the feeling that most gadgets are already sufficiently reliable. I feel like most goons probably take better care of their poo poo than the average person. I am essentially walking tech support for my extended family because everyone else drops poo poo, spills things on their stuff, gets viruses installed on their computers and phones, etc and it's always the manufacturer's fault, not because they can't take better care of their things.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:43
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DrNutt posted:Try explaining that to someone that feels very strongly that their anecdotes are as relevant as data. I would say old people continue to be the worst but I've seen plenty of people my age and younger trot out the "they keep making things worse and worse so you have to buy more" argument. People like to pretend that things weren’t manufactured to a price point in the past. We’ve always made goods as cheaply as possible. We’ve also made advancements in material science, product design, and product assembly that allow us to make even cheaper goods, and often they are of objectively better quality. People also love to ignore inflation in their cost comparisons. My grandparents bought a stereo for $800 in 1964. That’s over $6000 in today’s terms. Spend that same amount and you will absolutely get equipment of the same build quality, and with performance that far exceeds what was expected in 1964. And let’s also ignore that $800 spent today would also get you equipment that is objectively better in every measurable way, except for the weight of the chassis.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:45
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PT6A posted:Apart from battery life issues, I have owned exactly two pieces of technology that have had any sort of actual equipment failure during their useful lives. Maybe I'm just very lucky, but I get the feeling that most gadgets are already sufficiently reliable. My Samsung Galaxy S3 from the end of 2012 is still going strong and I have generally had good luck with TVs. Smart phones seem to be pretty structurally sound, but are much easier to break from user error (i.e. dropped in toilet or on concrete) than older cell phones or any other expensive piece of technology.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:47
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:By every single reasonable metric, average standard of living has gone up in the United States for the last 50 years. Even for people in the bottom 20%.  (Squints) The 50% contribution vs time does have an overall average positive slope so this is correct. Nocturtle fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 19:49
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Hey you might be living in a box under a bridge but at least you have YouTube! YouTube is great
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Sep 24, 2018 19:50
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PT6A posted:Apart from battery life issues, I have owned exactly two pieces of technology that have had any sort of actual equipment failure during their useful lives. Maybe I'm just very lucky, but I get the feeling that most gadgets are already sufficiently reliable. do you like your home cool? i have had a similar sort of effect and all i can figure is because i like my space very cold.
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Sep 24, 2018 19:58
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:My Samsung Galaxy S3 from the end of 2012 is still going strong and I have generally had good luck with TVs. Yeah, exactly. Unless you want consumer grade electronics to be armoured to the point you can’t gently caress them up through negligent behaviour, I don’t know what further advancements you could ask for.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:00
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There are still different grades of reliability in there. Just look at the physical durability of a typical Playstation console against the typical Nintendo console.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:04
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Inflation-adjusted median household income, median disposable income, and employment are all at or near record levels this year.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:08
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quote:Sears is running out of time to fix its problems, the CEO says. source: https://money.cnn.com/2018/09/24/news/companies/sears-eddie-lampert/index.html The looting of Sears' corpse continues.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:16
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:By every single reasonable metric, average standard of living has gone up in the United States for the last 50 years. Even for people in the bottom 20%. People do forget how awful life was for most westerners a half century, a century ago. We have essentially started from very low standards of living but since you start from near 0 for so many persons, even massive improvement percent still is little amount for many person. golden bubble posted:There are still different grades of reliability in there. Just look at the physical durability of a typical Playstation console against the typical Nintendo console. There is no different? If anything person with Wii was more likely to break a thing than with Playstation at same time, those remote controls broke many TV lol. suck my woke dick posted:Your TV breaks. No, this is not what was done. TV repair was very very expensive and very frequent for first few decades. Vacuum tube simply breaks very very often and was rather expensive. Switch to solid-state component in 70th and 80th tanked TV repair businesses as TV simply didn't break on regular schedules anymore. The price you would pay for a TV repair a few times a year in the 1960 would be like cost of whole new cheap but large HDTV of today. Besides you would rarely be keeping 20 year old TV then. It was too small or it was only monochrome, or it couldnt take the VCR you buy in 1980. Maybe you stick it in guest room or something where it only gets used a few hours a year by year 10 and then it never heats up or uses enough to break. Modern TVs usually go a decade or more without needing to be fixed anyway too is.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:28
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Nocturtle posted:
Holdings of wealth is not even close to the same thing as standard of living. If someone gets $100,000 a year raise and I get a $10,000 a year raise, then my share of total wealth has declined, but my standard of living has objectively gone up.
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Sep 24, 2018 20:31
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So what if, like, your costs go upLiquid Communism posted:Lampert has proposed that Sears sell its Kenmore appliance brand, as well as real estate and other assets, to pay down what it owes. In the letter, which was also filed with regulators, he said progress must be made "without delay."
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Sep 24, 2018 20:58
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Halloween Jack posted:So what if, like, your costs go up That's literally the measurement of disposable income. Unless inflation increases your costs by $10,000, then your standard of living rises.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:00
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I'm open to heterodox analysis, but "Real income has gone steadily upward for decades thanks to wage increases and lower cost of goods, in spite of education and health care costs" is a nuclear take.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:14
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Holdings of wealth is not even close to the same thing as standard of living. Quoted in the USA TYOOL 2018. Also note the posted plot does NOT show wealth share but actual wealth. But anyway we're in agreement. In addition to the very large increase in net wealth for below-median Americans over the past 50 years there are also similarly large increases in total income for the lower quantiles:  There's a lot of complaining about the immiseration of the middle class but it's not supported by the data. On topic the demise of Sears is fascinating as will the inevitable post-mortem. At some point Lampert switched from trying to create a Randian-inspired utopia to naked looting.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:14
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm open to heterodox analysis, but "Real income has gone steadily upward for decades thanks to wage increases and lower cost of goods, in spite of education and health care costs" is a nuclear take. It literally has. Do you know of some secret data that FRED doesn't have?
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Sep 24, 2018 21:19
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm open to heterodox analysis, but "Real income has gone steadily upward for decades thanks to wage increases and lower cost of goods, in spite of education and health care costs" is a nuclear take. That doesn't even seem to be taking housing into consideration, which is probably eating 50% or more of a lot of people's budgets right now. Granted there are areas where that's not the case, but then those areas also have lower incomes to go along with their lower cost of living so...
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Sep 24, 2018 21:27
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm open to heterodox analysis, but "Real income has gone steadily upward for decades thanks to wage increases and lower cost of goods, in spite of education and health care costs" is a nuclear take. Real income, real personal disposable income has gone up. But it is only by very small amount over many decade. Understandable that what goes up by very tiny fraction of a percent per year feels like it might as well be zero. Let us not even mention how cost of college does not matter if you had bad schooling and no chance to get to college regardless of if you could afford - is that not the situation for very many poor American? Or being qualified to go to college, but you had to get local low paying job right away from mandatory schooling.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:40
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It literally has. Edit: You do realize that neither of the graphs you posted are a measure of what the average person thinks of as "disposable income," right? That is, it doesn't take any expenses into account besides taxes. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 21:44
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suck my woke dick posted:Nowadays Joe is retired and new TVs can’t be easily repaired with a $10 drainpipe soldering iron and replacement capacitors large enough that you can still replace them after having had ten beers. If your 1000 dollar 19 inch tv broke in 1980s you spent the money to fix it because it cost 1000 nineteen eighties dollars. if you 70 dollar 19 inch tv breaks in 2018 you just buy a new tv. because tvs barely ever break anymore and are very cheap to replace. There is a lot to romanticize that stuff used to be better, but tvs just got better. They don't break as much and when they eventually do break they are very affordable to replace. There is also some that use glue or something in their construction but lots of tvs are actually super easy to repair now. Watch a teardown video, many tvs are super modular and everything plugs together with ribbon cables instead of soldered wires or anything. anyone could fix one of these, the replacement parts are cheap and there is no technical skill involved in swapping them out, it's all plug and play, but the whole tv is cheap to replace anyway:  TVs just got better, people love the idea that we are in a degenerate age and stuff used to be better but sometimes older stuff just is worse.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:48
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suck my woke dick posted:Nowadays Joe is retired and new TVs can’t be easily repaired with a $10 drainpipe soldering iron and replacement capacitors large enough that you can still replace them after having had ten beers. Joe may be retired but new TVs can be repaired by a $10 soldering iron with a bit smaller (and safer) capacitors. Its almost always an electrolytic capacitor that fails and you can see exactly what one failed. Solder in a replacement and you have a 95% chance of having a working TV for the next 2-3 years.
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Sep 24, 2018 22:03
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Nocturtle posted:But anyway we're in agreement. In addition to the very large increase in net wealth for below-median Americans over the past 50 years there are also similarly large increases in total income for the lower quantiles: Incomes on the middle-to-lower quintiles may have rebounded to where they were ten years ago, but everyone is paying a significantly higher percentage of their inflation-adjusted incomes on housing, healthcare, and education, with the end result being that they're spending more of their incomes on necessities and are saving less overall. (And of course, when you break these numbers down by demographics, you'll see that minority households haven't seen anything like the recovery that white ones have.)
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Sep 24, 2018 22:43
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It also doesn't help that that looks at "households." Underemployment is absolutely rampant among the young to the point where a lot of them aren't creating "households." A hell of a lot of the ones that would just love to are dealing with a combination of stagnating wages mixed with crippling student debt. Typical salaries staying steady does you somewhere between "very little" and "gently caress all" of good when you have to go into a massive pile of debt just to get a below average to average yearly income.
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Sep 24, 2018 22:59
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It also doesn't help that that looks at "households." Underemployment is absolutely rampant among the young to the point where a lot of them aren't creating "households." A hell of a lot of the ones that would just love to are dealing with a combination of stagnating wages mixed with crippling student debt. Typical salaries staying steady does you somewhere between "very little" and "gently caress all" of good when you have to go into a massive pile of debt just to get a below average to average yearly income. That's now how "household" is counted. Household is just the combined income of everyone over 18 living in the same location. It includes single people.
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Sep 24, 2018 23:39
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:It literally has. It's almost like they have data showing that poo poo costs more year on year that you're ignoring.
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Sep 24, 2018 23:45
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Death Panel Czar posted:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI Inflation existing doesn't mean that real disposable income is down. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0 This is easily google-able. Disposable income and standard of living are up for all income groups in America in the last 50 years.
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Sep 24, 2018 23:49
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Death Panel Czar posted:https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI That is just a graph showing inflation
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Sep 24, 2018 23:52
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Inflation existing doesn't mean that real disposable income is down. I'm really curious what galaxy brain explanation you've got for the consumer debt bubble. Disposable income went up so much everybody decided they needed to throw themselves onto a sword?
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Sep 24, 2018 23:54
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:That's now how "household" is counted. Then it includes people stuck living with their parents because there is no way that they can live on their own on $11 per hour Walmart wages and 5-figures of inescapable education debt, so they stay with their parents while everyone calls them a loser for still living with their parents. I live nowhere near a major metropolitan area and the average rent for a 1-bedroom flat here is about $725 a month while $11 is an above-average wage despite the "booming economy". After tax on that oh-so-generous $11 an hour, rent now represents nearly half of their living expenses. Keeping in mind that this does not represent health costs/insurance, debt or utilities and assumes 40 hours per week that few hourly workers get, that doesn't leave much. You're cherry-picking your "data" and trying to convince everyone that things are "really, fine everyone, really" without an understanding of the subtleties, like that raving sociopath of a president who talks about how many jobs there are all of the time even though the only supposedly abundant jobs are either for nurses, CDL drivers or McJobs who don't pay a living wage and have no benefits. I know that you're too much of a twat to admit it, but I'm guessing that you're one of those arseholes who nodded vigorously at that ludicrous and insulting "McDonald's budget" that came out a few years ago.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:00
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Death Panel Czar posted:Then add the real one to your horseshit chart. It's literally in the link. Why are you mad that the world is not as bad as you thought it was? And yes, if incomes go higher, then the aggregate total of revolving debt is likely to be higher.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:01
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JustJeff88 posted:Then it includes people stuck living with their parents because there is no way that they can live on their own on $11 per hour Walmart wages and 5-figures of inescapable education debt, so they stay with their parents while everyone calls them a loser for still living with their parents. I live nowhere near a major metropolitan area and the average rent for a 1-bedroom flat here is about $725 a month while $11 is an above-average wage despite the "booming economy". After tax on that oh-so-generous $11 an hour, rent now represents nearly half of their living expenses. Keeping in mind that this does not represent health costs/insurance, debt or utilities and assumes 40 hours per week that few hourly workers get, that doesn't leave much. Do you know how averages work? If someone is "living with their parents" on an "$11 per hour Wal-Mart wages," then that still drives down the average household income. You are having trouble holding onto the idea that both of these are simultaneously true: - The average American in every economic quintile is better off today than they were in 1950, 1960, or 1970. - That things being better doesn't mean that everything is perfect.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:04
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There's another way to think about stagnating wages and healthcare/education costs rising - wages aren't going up or are even declining, but the relative cost of goods is falling even faster (due to mentioned advances) but the cost of healthcare/education is static. So incomes fall, goods fall even faster, but services stagnate/rise, which means in real terms they skyrocket.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:21
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