No, when beanie babies were new you could play with them. When basketball cards were new you could trade them with your friends. They had inherent value first, and then they gained speculative value on the secondary market. Trump’s grift has no inherent value now or ever.
Do you honestly think that, on the off chance that the Trump family sells out of these things, they won’t immediately mint more? It’s “limited” in the same way Marvel movies are limited.
For now. And Google super mega promises to never rug pull that one.
For me, it was multi-account containers. All Meta properties open in their own independent, sandboxed tabs now. Xwitter opens in a different independent, sandboxed tab. It makes their tracking cookies useless, plus it also lets you be logged into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.
Cool. Glad we agree on that, at least. Cheers!
Please clarify.
Nah, honestly, by now the length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it. I’m not convinced by your argument even a little bit, but I’m really not compelled by talking about it anymore. Have a good one.
Whether or not it will be prosecuted is immaterial to whether or not it is legal.
Wohl and Burkman were sentenced to community service.
The charge they pled guilty to was fraud; that they “falsely claimed that mail-in voting would put voters into a database that would be used to collect outstanding debt, track down warrants or enforce mandatory vaccinations.” It doesn’t matter what the outcome was (intimidation or something else), the fraud was the crime.
Fox is a slightly different case, as they’re technically press and thus have a first amendment protection that automatically makes any case against them harder. But either way, the lack of prosecution is far from evidence that a crime was not committed.
I already identified exactly which law Musk is breaking and with what action. 52 USC 20511 and 52 USC 30101, if you find it particularly important.
Xwitter is definitely promoting disinformation, which is election interference and can be committed by American citizens. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman pled guilty in 2022 to hiring a firm to make calls spreading disinformation during the run-up to the 2020 election.
Xwitter is providing a measurable, financial benefit to the Trump campaign. That’s soft money, and using soft money to exceed individual campaign contribution limits is against the law.
As far as I can tell (not as an expert), the pitfalls and unforeseen issues are probably pretty much what they’d be for every new battery chemistry: how safe is it? Does it have really bad self-discharge? Is the supply consistent? How does it do at low charging levels? How long/how many cycles does such a cell last? Does it require an unsustainable amount of exotic minerals?
As well as what they are for any new technology: what is the replacement cost? Can they be installed in existing technology via drop-in or with a simple retrofit, or do you have to replace the entire unit? How long before they come to market? Can they maintain supply to match demand?
Probably a lot of those questions are business-related rather than technology-related (i.e. “will the companies developing this stuff put enough into R&D to solve these problems before releasing them?” not “do the laws of the universe allow this?”). I am not an expert, but before I put all my chips on solid-state batteries (something I’m pretty confident will be the norm eventually), I would want those answered.
I’m gonna start checking out Ghost, at this point. This is ridiculous.
And if Ghost doesn’t work, then ClassicPress it is.
You certainly can. They don’t know what you’re doing.
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I lost my job at the start of COVID right after my daughter was born (she was born in March, 2020, so we saw lockdowns come into effect while we were in the hospital).
Again, same. Though for me, it was December of 2019 and a son, and I was laid off in late January. Wild times.
But what I did have was 6-12 months expenses in cash.
We had carved away at our cash reserves building a house that our larger family could actually fit in, and they hadn’t built back up yet. It was a calculated risk to do that rather than buy, and I wouldn’t have changed the calculation in hindsight, but the one-two-three-four punch of house-child-layoff-pandemic within the span of a few months isn’t really something you expect when you’re doing the numbers.
That set us back a couple of years, but we were already ahead because we were living below our means. Fast-forward to today and we’re back to being ahead because we continued to live below our means.
I’m glad for you. And also: your situation is not normative.
Here’s an interesting article about household debt over time, which goes back to 1995 (so almost 30 years). […] debt got cheaper, so people got more debt.
A couple of things to note:
Those numbers end in 2010, which means that they’re actually almost as far away from today as the beginning of that study is from the end of that study. A lot has happened in the last 14 years.
Those numbers also end right as the country was digging its way out of the 2008 financial crisis, which was largely caused (as I’m sure you recall) by debt mismanagement (specifically subprime mortgages). Those numbers, in and of themselves, are signposts of the very institutional and systemic changes I’m taking about.
It’s impossible to disentangle the chicken and the egg here. Were people in more debt in 2010 because rates were low? Or were rates low because the economy was burning, largely because more people were in bad debt situations?
So people are in more debt today, but they’re paying about the same to service that debt. So people are spending more than they used to, but they’re able to do that because borrowing rates are lower.
Actually, the data suggests that private per capita spending in the US has tracked more or less with inflation since at least 1960.
In my experience, people largely paid for things w/ cash 30 years ago, whereas today paying with credit is a lot more common.
My parents used credit in the 90s. We had car payments and a mortgage (and their mortgage rate was in the double digits, no less—but it was still a smaller percentage of their single monthly income than my 2.8% mortgage is today, in a better field, with a second income.
People don’t save up to buy things as much, and instead buy now pay later.
Again, the chicken and the egg: do people not save up because they don’t want to? Or because they can’t? If our car dies, I can’t save up to buy another. I have to buy now and pay later.
So the real issue here is discipline, at least for those in the middle class and above.
With your caveat, I’m amenable to entertaining your argument for a significant portion of the population. I just don’t recognize it in practice.
being irresponsible with money is easier, which I think encourages more people to do it.
I just don’t see the numbers bearing that out. And anecdotally, it might be easier to sign up for a credit card online, but I was getting junk mail about credit cards on the day I turned 18, in 2003. One of my first jobs included trying to pitch a private label grocery store credit card to everyone who walked in. When I got to college (also in 2003), a credit card company had a booth there and was offering students free pizza if you signed up for a credit card. I didn’t bite, but there was a substantial line at that booth. So it might be quicker now, but I haven’t received a mailer for a credit card in years.
So I do think younger generations (including my own, I’m a millennial)
Me too. I think we might be the same person. This is honestly kind of weirding me out.
[…] are more irresponsible with money and have higher expectations of what that money can buy than previous generations. Over the last 30+ years, real wages have increased consistently (i.e. after taking inflation into account), and we’re back to the peak of the early 70s before the stagflation of the 80s. Yet people claim we’re getting poorer, so I have to take that as people having unrealistic expectations instead of an income problem.
Housing costs as a factor of monthly income are back up to 2008 Financial Crisis levels, though; and over the last two decades that growth you’re talking about has been concentrated largely at the top. The numbers support peoples’ assertion that we’re getting poorer.
Thanks for chatting with me about this. It’s a really interesting topic.
You and I have had remarkably similar lives, actually.
- myself - parents paid my tuition, I paid everything else (rent, food, books, etc) by working through school making a little over minimum wage (I’m long past this stage)
Same. I was a cashier and then a pharmacy tech.
Both sides of my family are generally fairly successful (middle class and upper middle class), with most of my cousins having completed a 4-year degree.
Close. I think about half of my cousins have a degree; the other half went into trades.
My family is largely quite successful (siblings are professor, accountant, actuary, and software engineer), I work in a field with a lot of successful people,
—same, but—
and my neighbors are largely fairly successful (mostly middle middle class to upper middle class).
Here’s where we differ. My neighbors are not poor, but the neighborhood is not yet completely gentrified. We have some K12 teachers, some construction workers, a few military people, alongside some people in more white collar high-earning-potential professions.
That said, I’ve had neighbors have cars repossessed, coworkers struggle w/ credit card debt, and people making more than me struggle with a house down-payment
Same. And it’s happened enough that there’s no way I can attribute it solely to bad decision making.
(and I bought in my late 20s making much less than I do now),
Same, though I had access to down payment assistance.
That said, I do admit I have limited personal experience with people in this situation.
Thank you for being honest about this. I would personally suggest that you talk with some people who are in situations like you’re talking about. Some of them knowingly made poor choices that led to their current struggles, but more often they were dealt one major blow or a series of minor blows at a time of high risk.
However, I personally choose to live like I’m a level below my means so I have a cushion in case something goes wrong.
I say this without malice: many (if not most) people who are struggling have never been able to make that choice meaningfully. I’m glad to have been able to, but it’s not common.
And one of my life goals is to leave my career early to actively help people with spending problems at all income levels to break that cycle, hence why I’m so interested in this.
I wish you luck in that, I truly do. Please consult with people who have been in the situations you’re talking about before you draw up a wonderful, shiny plan for their finances.
At the risk of sounding callous, this sounds like symptoms of the same underlying problem: lack of diligence.
Sometimes, maybe. But the point I’m making isn’t that no one ever makes mistakes. It’s that one or two such mistakes can end up catastrophically for people who don’t have far to wiggle. A person who is generally attentive to their finances but makes a couple of bad calls before they have a safety net can end up on the back foot for the rest of their life.
And no, I’m not saying they didn’t “work hard enough” or they should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” I’m saying they could have mitigated these problems by making different decisions:
Hindsight being 20/20, you’re always going to say you’d make different decisions when you have perfect vision as to the outcomes of the bad outcomes. But to avoid these in the first place, you’d have to have perfect view of the future.
job opportunity dry up - always have a backup plan; as The Money Guy host likes to say, make sure to include a “doo doo plan” in your projections (i.e. what you’ll do if the plan doesn’t work out)
I’ve been in a position several times where the job opportunity I accepted was the only one I was offered. Having a “doo doo plan” is great, if you have multiple options to begin with.
messy divorce - don’t just marry for love, make sure your goals align and you truly know who you’re getting involved with; divorce can still happen, but you can usually avoid abusive people by listening to advice from family and friends (i.e. those who aren’t blinded by hormones)
I agree with this to a point, but (hyperbole) nobody has ever gotten married truly thinking that they didn’t know their spouse well. Even family and friends can be wrong.
career training - look at expected outcomes from whatever the training is, not just the handful of success stories; as in, don’t blindly trust what the people giving the training claim, verify it by looking at market data or asking someone in the business
The case in point that I’m thinking about for this one was a person who entered a front end web development training program with the promise of job search assistance upon graduation. Reviews of the school were good, personal anecdotes from graduates were good. It was only after the program that my friend discovered the cracks in the process (as he was falling through one). Due diligence was done, to the satisfaction of most reasonable people. In this case, I think he was taken advantage of. Speaking of which…
I fully appreciate that many people don’t have the training or experience to avoid manipulation by others, which is a common thread here, so we absolutely need to improve our education system.
100% agree with you here.
But blaming others for your choices is a recipe for failure and isn’t going to help you move forward.
I apologize, I was unclear about this. None of the people I’ve mentioned are complaining or blaming others for their current state. Every single one of them is actively working to improve their situations. I’m saying, as a person who watched the trajectory of their lives from the outside, they weren’t the primary cause of their financial troubles.
I realize that it sounds like I’m leaving myself out of that, and I suppose I am blaming others here. But to be clear, I’m probably the most well-off of the people I’m talking about. In comparison to the people I’m talking about, my concerns are very minor. We’ll be ok, and we’re already working on improving our situation. And even I am not blaming any one person; I think the problem with my finances lies in historic inflation, a global pandemic, and corporate greed.
I have made my fair share of mistakes, some of them have cost me a lot. But I refuse to blame others and instead choose to point the finger back at myself, and I think that has made all the difference. And that’s what I’m getting at here: you can’t change your present, but you can make choices to change your future.
…if you know what the future holds.
[Ok, Lemmy is saying that this is too long, so I’m going to try to split my reply up.]
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Do you actually know anyone who’s in this situation?
In my experience, it’s not a choice they’ve made. Some people are bad with money, to be sure. I’m related to a few. But they don’t typically just decide they’re going to blow August’s grocery budget on a new wardrobe; they have a job opportunity dry up after they already moved for it, or they had a messy divorce because their spouse was abusive, or they poured a ton of money into some career training that turned out not to give them any real, marketable skills. Some bad choices, some unavoidable occurrences, some terrible luck, but nothing that crosses the line to them being frivolous.
Thirty years ago, a family could weather one or two of those, no problem. My dad got laid off not too long before I was born, and he was the sole earner for our family. He got hired fairly soon after, but in the meantime we were fine.
I don’t live a whole lot different than my parents did then. We have more kids than they did, but I’m in a higher earning potential career than he was. Plus, my wife and I are both employed. Yet if either of us were laid off, we would not last long on savings.
One thing I’ve learned as I get older: yeah, people are irresponsible. But the generations are pretty much the same, and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way to get clicks on your article but a bad way to actually get any meaningful insight about people. So if our generation is having more widespread problems than our parents’ generation did at this age, it’s probably not because we aren’t as responsible as they are. Something systemic probably changed.
not being strapped for cash is possible for pretty much anyone in the lower-middle class and above, and even those in the lower class could get there by stabilizing their finances so they can take some risks to increase their income (i.e. night school, quitting a bad job for a better job, getting CDL and financing a truck, etc).
It’s easy to say “stabilize your finances!” but on a practical level it’s almost impossible to do when there’s no wiggle room. You can’t stabilize any finances if you’re taking out payday loans in order to pay rent every month. It’s not like there’s any money to be put into savings if you’re making $2,000 a month but putting $1,000 toward rent, since most people rather like to eat.
I’m thankful to not be in that situation, personally, but it’s not something you can just wish your way out of. Even your examples require a certain level of financial breathing room that people don’t tend to have when every dollar is spoken for. You can’t finance a truck if your DTI is already high. You can’t take CDL training or night school if you have to work two jobs just to keep food on the table.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about lawyers and doctors having trouble keeping up with debt payments because they got caught trying to keep up with those wealthier than them.
But if you get into that scenario, you can just sell the supercar or downsize your house or whatever. That’s not really an option for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
So I don’t think “strapped for cash” is a good metric for economic class, income is,
I think income divided by local cost-of-living could be, maybe.
At the end of the day, irresponsibility with money is still a problem for sure. And keeping-up-with-the-joneses is probably a problem for some people. I’m not one of them, and none of the people I know are either, but I suppose some people have that issue. In my experience, though, most people who are struggling financially are not in those situations. They’re just trying to keep their heads above water.
I disagree strongly that $1k is enough for any one emergency. My healthcare deductible is higher than that. The last two times I’ve needed car repairs, the bill was $2-3k to get the thing back on the road. If one of our appliances breaks down, we might be able to replace it for $1,000 if it’s the dryer or the dishwasher, but if it’s the fridge, that’s not close to enough.
$1,000 was plenty when I was in college back in the mid-00s, but I was single with no kids. That’s just not a realistic emergency fund in 2024, and even less so if you have a family.
Honestly, what you see isn’t familiar to me at all. The people I know are very good at being frugal and wringing the last out of every dime, not being extravagant or frivolous, etc. We have no car payment on our ten-year-old minivan, own our home, and haven’t been clothes shopping in years except to replace things that wear out, that sort of thing.
The problem isn’t budgeting; we have a budget, and we stick to it pretty well. There are very few things we could cut, and doing so might save us a hundred or so dollars per month. The problem is that inflation has eaten up every dollar from my paycheck we used to have in surplus. The problem is that my salary hasn’t kept up with inflation and nobody else around here is hiring.
Yes, you can budget yourself from the top of one financial class into the bottom of another one; and you can manage money poorly enough to drop from anywhere to the bottom of the heap. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a significant financial crunch happening for most people in the world right now.
Seems like everyone has their own preferred explanation as to why that’s happening (corporate greed vs. government overreach), but the fact that it’s happening seems pretty clear.
For sure, but like…I’m a middle-aged software engineer in a low cost-of-living area. My parents always had enough on one income, but we’re struggling on two.
No, you can’t. You can pretend to, but I can pretend to trade things with anyone without paying any money. The only thing stored on the Blockchain is a URL to an image which everyone just agrees to pretend that you own; if that server goes down, you have nothing.