I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"
It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
I cancelled every sub except for like, Youtube and Rider over 2025. No more Amazon, no more media services, no more gym membership, no more premium news.
I saved $300/month at best. Rent is 2200 a month. Yes, clearly that stabucks latte is what's doing me in.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.
It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative.
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation.
Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about.
I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
Yeah. Anyone who still doubts how bad things are: "interview" for a month. Just a month. It will be very apparent but many people who are content in their careers would never otherwise notice.
It's no wonder Gen Z is so cynical. People are talking about how good things are and they can't even get a human to respond to them for their first step in.
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.
So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".
Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
>Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead.
In L.A.. Don't worry, you can't get ahead here anymore either. It's all coming unraveled.
>This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
Yeah, the infamous White Flight. It's always been an issue, but if we're being frank: it's affecting whites now too so now we're starting to seriously talk about it.
(pedantic nit-pick, sorry) Killkenny is only a city by charter, it has a population as of the last census of 27,184 – it is in no sense of the word an actual city.
Peter Thiel is not a person that anyone should listen to. That being said if you want to see real poverty come to the South East and drive an hour outside of any major metropolitan area. These are folks that would likely be unhoused if they lived in a city, but are scraping by and making it work in a 40 year old single wide that is falling apart. Capitalism in this country works as it has been designed to since the Reagan administration. Socialized losses, privatized gains, and a massive transfer of wealth straight to the top. Innovation means nothing if we kill our planet and subjugate the masses.
20 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 45.2 ms ] threadIt’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
I saved $300/month at best. Rent is 2200 a month. Yes, clearly that stabucks latte is what's doing me in.
When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail.
I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question.
We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was.
Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
It's no wonder Gen Z is so cynical. People are talking about how good things are and they can't even get a human to respond to them for their first step in.
https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/
The bottom 90% of Americans only have 32% of the wealth.
People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x.
People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked.
The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well.
The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths.
And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City.
So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis".
Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
In L.A.. Don't worry, you can't get ahead here anymore either. It's all coming unraveled.
>This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself.
Yeah, the infamous White Flight. It's always been an issue, but if we're being frank: it's affecting whites now too so now we're starting to seriously talk about it.
Still, bad for everyone overall.
http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_...