They have given us fuck all for raises during a period of rampant inflation and now they want to take away the one good thing that covid-19 did for workers.
The "Chart 1" in both of those seems to be almost the same logarithm and the 18-56 "baby boomer" chart at age 36 appears to be roughly the same number of jobs. It might even be slightly higher in the baby boomer chart at age 36.
In a real inflation, why would profits be down? If the company has any pricing power, they just increase the price. In fact, the definition of inflation is prices increases.
If it is just corporate profits the state and county sure piled on by increasing my property taxes 40% over the past 3 years. That's an extra $300 a month for me which is more than my car payment.
It's an oft-mentioned point in the last few yearss to focus on raw income and not on spending power. if you get 50% more pay but rent doubles, the vast majority of people would have less spending power. same with job numbers. "Unemployment is historically low!". meanwhile, gig and part time worked soard while full time jobs dipped.
In addition, you look further and realize how people who "gave up" after 2-3 months without an interview are not counted as "unemployed" and you realize there's a lot to break down, that no one is breaking down
Does the median earner when considering the entire country struggle to pay rent? Or is it just the median earner in certain extremely expensive metro areas that happen to get a lot of focus in the media because that's where the journalists live?
The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.
There is every chance that income is a multi-modal distribution, and thus one should not talk of a single median.
However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.
Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".
My apologies, home ownership costs are not included in inflation measures. But I was wrong and you're correct: rents are.
Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the proliferation of these stories.
but no one is digging in to talk about the regional variation. SF going back to being "still one of the highest CoL post genrification" instead of "unbearable for all but the elite" isn't exactly comforting.
I don't love the game of "someone posted a random article with some numbers that they found from a 5 minute Google search, but now I have to do the much harder & longer work of verifying if it's legitimate or misleading"
Since HN doesn't allow pasting images into comments (good!), I did not paste the numerous charts from the St. Louis Fed and others that I have bookmarked to show this data in various different ways. Also, the FRED numbers only go to 2022 in their data plotter, which is a problem if you want newer data (it exists).
What would prefer me to do? Post a dozen links that all the same thing, arguably less obviously?
I have not seen a single one yet that shows a decline in real wages.
Maybe this isn't that Axios journalist's field, but that huge spike of 9.1% annual inflation in 2022 won't be made up for by a 1% difference in 2024. Showing only the current rate and not the cumulative effects seems disingenuous.
You're both right. Real wages are down from the pandemic, but that's because they spiked massively due to the stimulus spending [1]. Real wages today are where they were in Q1 2020, which was the highest they had been since at least 1982.
Both the Axios and Journal charts are confusing because they're taking the first derivative of a complex curve.
Thanks for posting that graph. When I went to FRED to get it, i only got a data series to 2022. I consider this be the most definitive measure that I've seen yet.
It probably doesn't matter too much, but this is a lossy conversion. For example "Fred McIntosh" -> "MCINTOSH Fred". So the capitalization of the "I" is lost.
Apple is so in love with walled gardens. I can't imagine them ever making truly open hardware. Perhaps they are uniquely qualified to make something open because of the amount of effort they have put into making things that are closed.
It's not that they love walled gardens, it's that they have different priorities than other companies. Users and usability are their primary concerns. Everything else is done to support that.
They have open-source initiatives, they like to be open like that when it doesn't interfere with those mandates. It's just that usability is such a huge thing that it impacts every step of their process.
A $10K lottery is a horrible idea. Most people know that on average you will lose money by buying lottery tickets. What makes it worth playing (for some people) is the (very small) chance of winning fuck you money. If I win $10k, I would be excited and happy about it, but it's going to have very little long-term effect on my lifestyle.
I won't say that I thought about the numbers too much, so I'd agree that it's a "horrible" idea, however I want to point out a few things:
> Most people know that on average you will lose money
I don't think most people know this. Perhaps you do. Perhaps most of us here on HN know, but I strongly doubt most people who play do, given that most people who play are poor [1].
> What makes it worth playing...
This isn't true either. Most people who play play it for the smaller winners [1].
Finally, I just want to reiterate that the point of this is exactly what you mentioned. By making the amount small enough such that it wouldn't have a huge effect on your lifestyle, you make it safer to disclose who won.
I suspect that many of the people who play the lottery don't view money as having a strictly linear value. Spending a dollar a day on lottery tickets is a cost that is easy to absorb (think of how many people think nothing of buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks every day). Winning the lottery means getting a relatively large infusion of cash at once, at that infusion has a higher value to power people than the loss of a small amount of money.
Put another way, as a one-time deal, would you consider spending $1 for a 1-in-a-million chance to win $100,000? For many people, that isn't a totally unreasonable bargain. But if I ask you that 10,000 times, the cost becomes spending $10,000 for a 1-in-100 chance to win $100,000. That's the real problem with the predatory nature of the lottery.
I grew up around some businesses that sold various lottery products. I'm not trying to sound mean or dismissive at all when I say this, just strictly matter of fact: I talked to a large and incredible variety of idiots and uneducated people that bought lottery tickets, whether scratch-offs or traditional Powerball type. They all universally knew the odds were bad. Universally.
They also figured that for a few dollars - which most of them could easily afford here and there - those were the best odds they were ever going to have.
1. Use a freezer to make a tray of ice cubes
2. Use a kettle to boil water
3. Pour the boiling water over the ice and enjoy lukewarm water that required an excess of power to create.
