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Wheeee posted:New cars aren't expensive, you're just relatively poor because of wage stagnation over the last few decades while inflation and housing costs kept on rising. QFT I don’t know how people can afford rent these days much less a car payment
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Jun 17, 2020 16:33
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KillHour posted:I feel like Hyundai's plan here is "let's make all the cars car people claim to want but nobody will make and they'll HAVE to love us" without realizing why nobody makes them. If you end up as the only viable make in those categories, even if they aren't the biggest, it could still be a win.
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Jun 17, 2020 17:18
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Wheeee posted:New cars aren't expensive, you're just relatively poor because of wage stagnation over the last few decades while inflation and housing costs kept on rising. Watching classic Price is Right shows from the 70s and 80s when they say the price for items is a trip. A refrigerator in the 80s cost 1000 bucks, a brand new Trans Am 12000 and all I say is "holy poo poo a dollar bought a gently caress load more back in the day"
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Jun 17, 2020 17:41
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Some level of inflation in an economy is necessary and good, the problem is that in the late 70's/early 80's a new and extremely stupid artificially manufactured brand of economic theory took over in the West, resulting in the slow destruction of the historical anomaly that was the working 'middle class' and further impoverishment of the working class. There's a lot of smug white collar workers who don't realize that automation is going to obsolete their asses in the coming decade, if they aren't outsourced first, and when that happens and the last vestige of hope for people being able to train their way into a stable financially rewarding career dies you'll see poo poo start getting really real. People in America--and Canada--today are far poorer than they realize due to the proliferation of cheap consumer goods and technological advances making them think they've got it better sitting in their one-bedroom apartment with a giant flatscreen than their parents did with their suburban box house, multiple vehicles, and annual vacations. Wheeee fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 18:02
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Plus all the contracting. The whole "by your bootstraps" idea in the 50s that you could work your way up from the mailroom or the janitor's closet to become a higher level manager just doesn't exist anymore because the people handling your mail and cleaning your bathrooms are contractors with no relationship at all to your company and thus have no upward prospects.
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Jun 17, 2020 18:13
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Even in cases of entry level positions such as those being full employees, the idea that someone will ever go from the mailroom to the boardroom is wishful thinking built on extremely rare outliers at best and an abject lie at worst, and even in the past most of the stories of that happening don't cover the part where the guy had friends/family in high places and/or an education from an 'elite' institution which gave them the correct class signifiers. Raw competence will get you into middle-management at best if you don't have the social network or class status necessary to become a corporate made man, generally. Why do so many generic jobs require a university degree, any degree who cares if it's even relevant to the job? Gatekeeping. If anything, the tech industry was a ray of hope in that demonstrated competence and ability to attain certifications were sufficient to succeed, but as time goes on and the industry ages that's changing too; I've got a buddy with over a decade of experience including time in management while holding certs including the CISSP and OSCP who finished an irrelevant undergrad degree via night school just to be able to open more doors.
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Jun 17, 2020 18:52
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Wheeee posted:People in America--and Canada--today are far poorer than they realize due to the proliferation of cheap consumer goods and technological advances making them think they've got it better sitting in their one-bedroom apartment with a giant flatscreen than their parents did with their suburban box house, multiple vehicles, and annual vacations. I think you're strongly overestimating the totality of the 1950s/60s standard of living.
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Jun 17, 2020 18:56
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think you're strongly overestimating the totality of the 1950s/60s standard of living. More like overstating, I am aware that most people in the 50's and 60's weren't living the perfect American Dream and that most discussions about how things were better during that period need a giant loving asterisk pointing to a disclaimer that it applies to white people, but in general it was actually possible to afford a reasonable standard of living with a single simple job. There's a whole lot more to quality of life than the ratio of wages to living expenses, but looking only at simple economic metrics, yea poo poo's been getting worse for decades.
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Jun 17, 2020 19:02
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Yeah, I meant really the accessibility of that standard of living.
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Jun 17, 2020 19:09
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Wheeee posted:There's a lot of smug white collar workers who don't realize that automation is going to obsolete their asses in the coming decade, if they aren't outsourced first, and when that happens and the last vestige of hope for people being able to train their way into a stable financially rewarding career dies you'll see poo poo start getting really real. The only way for an individual to avoid this is to find a job that is somehow physically based in a particular place, while also being something that is hard or impractical to automate. That cozy IT job that you can do perfectly well working from home? Yeah, some dude on the other side of the planet could do that, and probably cheaper. I work in IT, but more on the interaction with business lines side of things, I'm not a developer, but I work closely with my developer colleagues. I harbor no illusions that my job couldn't be done by some dude in India, aside from the physical meetings. My biggest strength in this job is ~12 years of knowing the business and understanding the systems and processes, knowing which levers to pull and which shortcuts to take. Honestly, I simply don't know if I could pivot to the same position in a different company, basically starting from scratch on the whole business knowledge thing. And really, I'm sick of it. I want to do something meaningful instead. Something fulfilling, rather than endless business and tech nonsense, sauced in buzzwords and BS. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 19:39
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KozmoNaut posted:And really, I'm sick of it. I want to do something meaningful instead. Something fulfilling, rather than endless business and tech nonsense, sauced in buzzwords and BS. For similar reasons a few years ago I went into public service, which has kneecapped my income potential, and despite the same bureaucratic bullshit that exists in every large organization just the general vibe of the organization and the work I do actually having a socially useful purpose rather than shoveling capital into the gaping maws of the parasitic class has taken a subconscious load off.
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Jun 17, 2020 19:46
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Wheeee posted:More like overstating, I am aware that most people in the 50's and 60's weren't living the perfect American Dream and that most discussions about how things were better during that period need a giant loving asterisk pointing to a disclaimer that it applies to white people, but in general it was actually possible to afford a reasonable standard of living with a single simple job. The fresh out of high school 18 year old having a starting income sufficient to raise a family on his income alone and take vacations on the jersey shore is a myth. That job and wage data is all available and there are no surprises. Minimum wage in 1950 was 75 cents or about $7.50 today and median family income was around $3000 or equivalent to $30,000. What’s different is that the median home price was $7000 where the median home price today is around $250,000 or 3.5 times higher. There is a good argument that this is due, in large part, to cheap credit and 30 year mortgages where the monthly payment drives the cost. All that said there is a huge disconnect in corporate profits, productivity and wages where the first two are outpacing the third significantly since about 1980.
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Jun 17, 2020 22:03
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Your other missing piece is student loans. You didn't need a degree to get a job above minimum wage in 1950 and even if you needed to pay for a trade school or went to college, you weren't going in for for debt several times your starting salary to get that training/degree most of the time (a few specialized fields excepted.) Today, an 18 year old, fresh out of high school, really doesn't have much for any prospects beyond minimum wage unless they continue their education. If they do, they are left with basically a mortgage before they even get a mortgage. THEN you get into the fact that retirement is basically self funded these days with 401k instead of getting pension plans and the pie for the worker gets even smaller. THEN you factor in the price of healthcare today and you are left looking if there's any pie left at all. But the starting statement itself is glossing over a bit. I don't think anyone here was saying an 18 year old in 1950 could march right up and purchase a house on their first adult job. But it was possible for that person to save while still being self sufficient and they had more prospects for higher paying work without having to go into more debt. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 22:25
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Murgos posted:The fresh out of high school 18 year old having a starting income sufficient to raise a family on his income alone and take vacations on the jersey shore is a myth. That job and wage data is all available and there are no surprises. Somewhat; for people living in a big city going for their first service industry job, yea they weren't ballin', but in places where manufacturing and resource extraction jobs were in abundance it was--until relatively recently in some regions--easy to walk into a good paying job at a lumber mill or some poo poo without even a high school diploma. This wasn't everyone, but it was a lot of people, and those old jobs are largely either gone or cut back to the point that getting a job stacking lumber in a mill now basically requires you to know someone who can hook you up. Broad statistics like you cited aren't useful divorced from context and as often as not are employed in wildly misleading manners; economics as a field is an ideologically poisoned shitshow, not a science. quote:There is a good argument that this is due, in large part, to cheap credit and 30 year mortgages where the monthly payment drives the cost. back in the 2000's here in Canada CMHC was insuring mortgages with amortization periods up to 40 years lol Wheeee fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 22:28
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bull3964 posted:Your other missing piece is student loans. You didn't need a degree to get a job above minimum wage in 1950 and even if you needed to pay for a trade school or went to college, you weren't going in for for debt several times your starting salary to get that training/degree most of the time (a few specialized fields excepted.) No, those good paying middle income jobs were not just there for the picking right off the tree. A machine or heavy equipment operator was and is a skilled trade requiring a decade and more of experience. Read the data again. The median income was 3000 a year and the minimum was 1500 a year. That means half the population was in the 1500 to 3000 a year bracket. That’s a lot of people making not much money. Edit: No, a college education doesn’t guarantee you wealth but it never did. You still need to accumulate experience. As someone who works with unionized skilled technicians on a daily basis I also know that those jobs do still exist and yes it still takes a decade to get good enough at then to get good money. Edit2: don’t take my word for it. 1954 durable goods manufacturing wage data from 1954: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/factory-workers-earnings-distributions-straight-time-hourly-earnings-april-1954-4479 40% nationwide earned less than $1.50 an hour. In the south this was 60%. There was a vanishingly small fraction earning $2.50/hr. That is the most senior and well paid jobs were at $5000 a year or equivalent to $50,000 a year today and you better believe those people were skilled. Fix their equipment without taking down the line, meeting production quotas week in and week out. Adjusting on the fly for quality of raw materials. Skills learned over a lifetime. Murgos fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 00:54
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I outright said that good job required training and that it wasn't right there for an 18 year old. What is true is that you didn't need to go into debt to the tune of $20,000 in 1950 money to get that training in most cases. For example, an apprentice ironworker in the 1950s was paid half a journeyman's wages while they trained. Paid. It wasn't "intern at an ironworker's feet for 4+ years, paying the whole time for the classes and materials used in the class while earning a few bucks in the off hours doing something else when you weren't training" It was "get accepted as an apprentice, earn a low but livable wage while you gained the experience necessary to go up in the ranks." No, not everyone could or did something like that (that's why class divides still existed back then as well.) But those are the seeds of middle class and you can't plant those these days without having the equivalent of a mortgage or two hanging over your head when you finally start earning money. The ground has been salted before anything germinates. An ironworker that started apprenticing in his early twenties could expect to be a full fledged union member by their 30s (if they were any good) at which point they were earning middle class wages and could do it without any debt incurred as a direct result of their education. Again, those jobs (and ones like them in manufacturing) were finite, not everyone who wanted them could get them. But they were a drat sight more plentiful than what you have today. Manufacturing was booming and the US had half the population it does right now (along with fewer women in the workforce which shrunk it further.) The US moved into a service economy and abandoned the idea of apprenticeships for unpaid internships and years of college courses that no one can afford without abandoning hope being out of debt before the age that their parents retired. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 01:59
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To use an example, in America the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases regular reports on employment statistics, including unemployment, and most of the op-ed writers who boost these reports willingly or otherwise ignore the actual methodology and context of what they're regurgitating. Somehow, unemployment usually drops when it's convenient! Except their data are bullshit and the methodologies they use are specifically designed to produce results in line with expectations. Similarly, 'poverty levels' are completely arbitrary standards which can be, and are, futzed to fit narratives. There's an American aphorism I've heard which goes something like, when you are in grade school you learn that the civil war was about slavery, then in high school you learn that it was way more complex than being about slavery, and then in college you learn that actually no that's all rationalizing bullshit and it really was just about slavery. Wheeee fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 02:35
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bull3964 posted:I outright said that good job required training and that it wasn't right there for an 18 year old. What is true is that you didn't need to go into debt to the tune of $20,000 in 1950 money to get that training in most cases. I feel like you are so eager to denigrate the modern college experience in the US that you are missing half the point. The median wage, that is half the working population in 1950, made less than 30k a year in adjusted dollars. This includes your hypothetical skilled tradesman for most of those positions. An entry level target employee come right in at the top of that. A shift supervisor makes an equivalent of a very skilled and senior factory job. Expectations are high today. People have a reasonable belief that they should be doing even better than that, and I wholly agree. But we don’t have to romanticize the 1950s experience out of alignment with all the data to make that argument. Falsity isn’t going to make a believable case.
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Jun 18, 2020 13:56
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You still are ignoring the impact of debt load today vs 70 years ago. Regardless, this is a derail and not really a place for such a debate.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:26
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Wheeee posted:To use an example, in America the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases regular reports on employment statistics, including unemployment, and most of the op-ed writers who boost these reports willingly or otherwise ignore the actual methodology and context of what they're regurgitating. Somehow, unemployment usually drops when it's convenient! BLS publishes U-4 through U-6 which all include discouraged workers, and others. U-6 is probably the most accurate of the measures.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:51
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Read about a new car you like? It may have been made with union labor, although because of conservative politics over the past 50 years that's increasingly rare!
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Jun 18, 2020 15:22
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Lately, I have been screwing around on AutoTrader under the guise of research. Here are a few notes in an extremely Internet Car Guy voice: You'd have to be mad to buy a new Mazda 3 when a lightly-used Mazda 6 2.5T on the same lot is the same price or even cheaper. While I don't like the idea of buying a 4-cylinder compact luxury car that's between $40-50K new, they become a lot more attractive when they're between $18-25K coming off a lease. The German 2.0Ts all go above 300 HP / 300 lb-ft with a visit from a tuner, you get a lower sound floor from the factory instead of having to tear your car apart to install sound deadening, and reliability isn't a nightmare yet at this stage of ownership. You also aren't harming anyone as an enthusiast because these cars aren't really enthusiast-focused anymore, e.g. only the 2.0T G70 comes with a stick new. Giulia Tis are $20K off-lease and if you believe Jason Cammisa (a noted Italian car apologist FWIW), he swears up and down that the 4-cylinder Giulias have been fine for reliability. It's the Quadrifoglio that has been Very Problematic, and has gotten all the attention because a Giulia QV lived up to Alfa's infamous reputation under Car and Driver's care. You can also get a nice A4 or C-Class in this price range.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:38
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Some people do not want a bigger car. when I street parked in Boston I actively wanted the smallest car I could find. Even now, my parking space is a pain in the rear end to get in and out of.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:52
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Yup. I'm even thankful my Golf R is almost 5.5 inches shorter in length than my '11 WRX was.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:56
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I thought pretty carefully about golf wagon vs GTI for that reason. I wanted the space but an extra foot of length can make a big difference.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:57
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I would absolutely take a Mazda 3 over a 6 at similar prices. Smaller is better and the new 3 looks so good.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:37
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"bigger = better" is how US car culture tanked
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Jun 18, 2020 18:00
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Guinness posted:"bigger = better" is how US car culture tanked You're making 9.2 inches sound like the difference between an '82 Accord and an '82 Caprice. For this size increase - which isn't an issue for me and most of the country as a 6 is still smaller than a Tahoe - you get a faster car, more usable space for passengers and cargo, and a better-riding car. The higher fuel costs aren't an issue in the U.S., and there are no regulatory incentives that I know of to push people into smaller gas-powered cars like there are in the EU. And you're not taking either of these cars to the track where the size and weight penalty would be most obvious. That being said, on the Honda side you should go Civic because of Honda's packaging wizardry unless you must have the 2.0T or the luxury offered in the higher-trim Accords.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:34
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Smaller 3 with a manual > bigger 6 with auto
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Jun 18, 2020 18:39
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also weird to be like "this used car has more features for the same price than this new car" yes we are aware of how used cars work
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Jun 18, 2020 18:40
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:also weird to be like "this used car has more features for the same price than this new car" yes we are aware of how used cars work I am making this comparison because the case for a new 3 is significantly undercut by a car that has a high probability on being on the same lot. Mazda makes reliable cars today so there is no comedy repair bill involved like with the German cars usually involved in these comparisons. The turbo 6s I'm seeing have 20K miles or less, which is not a significant amount of wear and tear for a modern car.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:50
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According to Google the 2020 Mazda 6 is 193" long vs the 2020 3 Hatchback at 176". That's 17 inches difference. It's also an inch wider and 400 pounds heavier. Also no hatchback and no manual option. I'd very much notice that size difference in my urban garage/driveway. The 6 is a nice car no doubt, but they really are not the same class of vehicle at all and there are a lot of reasons someone might want a smaller car.
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Jun 18, 2020 18:52
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The 6 is also quite dated - it's had facelifts but the basic car came out in 2012. Also the 6 sedan has no rear headroom even compared to my previous gen 3 hatch. The 6 wagon on the other hand has a shorter wheelbase so is a couple of inches shorter overall yet has more interior space - this is what I intend to replace the 3 with.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:08
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Turns out there's a $70k Subaru STI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYRdI2ktG4s I never knew this was a thing, it's actually extremely cool.
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Jun 20, 2020 07:41
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Wheeee posted:Turns out there's a $70k Subaru STI Savage Geese still killing it. Cool stuff.
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Jun 20, 2020 19:21
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I hope he’s making good money. The view count on his videos isn’t super high but his quality is amazing for a one- or two-man shop.
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Jun 21, 2020 03:15
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Zoom Zoom, motherfuckers
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Wheeee posted:Turns out there's a $70k Subaru STI Putting into well explained words what we have been thinking - we know there's a lot wrong with new cars but otherwise cant quite come up with the expression ourselves.
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Jun 21, 2020 05:07
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Wheeee posted:Turns out there's a $70k Subaru STI I would like to correct SG by pointing out that Honda has also commissioned an artisanally-crafted, hand-built car from their in-house performance division that is even rarer than the STI S209: the second-gen NSX. The mention of the ATS-V made me look them up on AutoTrader and man it's a bummer that 80% of them are saddled with GM's lemon 8-speed.
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Jun 21, 2020 15:56
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I miss scott turbowski tho
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Jun 21, 2020 19:49
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Scott's "I review cars while hating them" gimmick was funny for a little while, but wore thin for me.
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Jun 21, 2020 20:02
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