What do you mean by independent young adult. Is that even possible to be any more?

Yes

I was born into a poor family, single mom with mental illness. I never had air conditioning, we spent many years without a hot water heater lugging water boiled on the stove into a bath tub to wash up. My family drove beaters. Moved out at 14. Dropped out of high school. Spent a few years figuring out my shit. Got an associates at 25 at a community college. Got a job in IT support making 50k… ten years later at 100kish.

Today the same thing can happen but entry level pay is 10-15k higher. Renting just a room is still doable on that entry level pay. Community college costs are still effectively 0 if you have 0 expected family contribution. I did work retail while I was in community college part time, offsetting cost of living expenses only. Avoid education loans at all costs imo, you can’t declare bankruptcy and dump them if the worst case scenario happens and a degree is not a guaranteed job.

I never gambled health, safety or finances. I didn’t do drugs or get involved in something that could fuck my life too hard. I never spent a dollar I didn’t have in the bank unless it was absolutely necessary and still live that way because I grew up knowing how valuable money is, and how much it sucks when you don’t have it.

Nowadays even around Boston on public transit lines (no car expense) you can find a studio apartment for 1500/mo with nothing included. Once you’re making 60k you can squeak by living alone. You can instead save probably 1k by having roommates/a girlfriend and splitting bills. After five years and two job changes you’re gonna be able to bank a lot more money than you’d think.

People want it to be easy to live a high quality lifestyle but it just doesn’t work that way. Most people had parents struggling when they were growing up but they still managed to make it. If you get a bachelors degree in a higher quality major like analytics you can make way more money than I do.

One big mistake early and you’re fucked though. Babies, major health accidents, lack of dental maintenance all can hose you for a huge portion of your life. If you choose to live near family far away from jobs and opportunities you’re fucked. I have a ton of friends with child support payments that eat most of their take home pay.

To follow up with this… they have a stupid video on their page where they break down expenditure of a girl in Houston who makes 65k. Insurance and rent takes half. Food is minimal at $271

$3/lb for boneless antibiotic free chicken breasts here in Massachusetts. https://www.shopmarketbasket.com/sites/default/files/weekly-flyer/pdfs/2024-05/mb-flyer-May5-May11-2024_web.pdf

42% are in school or are unemployed. 28% are working part time.

Yeah, food is the only real expense when you’re at home or in a dorm and not paying those student loans yet.

Considering only 30% of the people in this survey from ages 18-34 are working full time, i’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t an accurate representation of independent young adults.

26% are in school and 16% are unemployed for a total of 42% not really making money / are using loans for housing or are living at home.

28% are working part time and are unlikely to be living on their own - it’s rare to find a part time gig that can afford housing.

So 22% think housing is the highest cost issue… and only 30% are employed full time… sounds about right to me! I’m guessing it’s not 30% because those 8% got mortgages during the 4% or lower interest rate era.

Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers

I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They’re not going to be using cloud services, they’re going to privately host because it’s way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.

Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn’t alter the bottom line.

I pay for a single netflix sub, crunchyroll, and a vpn service.

After netflix announced ads i’ve been more and more considering dumping them and just focusing on that vpn service. I have paid for years and years of streaming services but I can’t possibly comprehend how prices need to go up again and again, almost always by double digit percentage points. The cost of storage and bandwidth goes down over time, servers get cheaper over time… there’s hardly any first party new media that is worth watching so i’m struggling to understand why i’m paying more.

The most bizarre thing to me though are people who pay for live TV… why in the world would you ever do that in 2024 with all the better options out there?

even India and China is getting behind sanctions.

Today this article popped up about sanctioning china because they are supplying russian arms manufacturers with resources: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/26/antony-blinken-beijing-visiit-china-us-relations-foreign-minister-wang-yi

A quick google search pulls up dozens of articles about how China is helping the Russian war effort…

India however doesn’t supply arms, but instead buys them from Russia. Instead India is buying Russia’s oil, funding their war effort in another way. India is buying 13x the amount of oil they would normally buy from Russia pre-war. https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/19/europe/russia-oil-india-shadow-fleet-cmd-intl/index.html

I don’t see China truly reducing their war supplies to China, nor do I see India calling off their oil deal. Unless Russia is actually cut off they’re just going to keep getting supplies.

That isn’t how it works though. Nobody is collecting billions in wages. They receive stock which isn’t counted as taxable income until sold.

they’re basically embargo’d by most of the world

A big portion of the world isn’t aligned with the US and has no embargo on Russia. Like we’re talking almost everything except US / Western Europe / Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#/media/File:Russian-list-of-unfriendly-countries.svg

Same deal almost everywhere… but firsthand experience is that a significant portion of all drivers have their phone out.

Would love to see some proportional crash rates of autopilot use vs not autopilot use too. People focus on things like crash totals or death totals. 17 deaths is a tragedy to be sure.

That being said when the US has over 40,000 auto deaths per year… and this article is telling me only 17 deaths are in any way involved with Autopilot since 2019… I really wonder why this is somehow more outrageous than the ~240,913 other vehicle deaths in the US since 2019. Given that Tesla is about 5% of all autos in the US, I would expect tesla deaths to be about 12,000 deaths in that period, or 5%.

Are so few people using autopilot? Shouldn’t the autopilot death toll be something closer to the 2000 deaths per year one would expect statistically from Tesla Drivers?

Is autopilot much safer than human drivers? Is it more dangerous?

Is Autopilot + Attentive safer than just attentive?

Is the 40k deaths per year not something that should be considered simply because people stop thinking of so many deaths as a tragedy and just think of it as a statistic?

Is the outrage and focus on car self driving just an extension of human phobia of technology and articles allow for people to have anecdotal confirmation bias?

If you try using adaptive cruise control and lane assist functions as a method to keep your hands off the wheel you’re going to be in for a bad time.

I’m sure it’s not all cars, but all the ones i’ve been in over the past 10 years generally only jerk you back to the middle of the lane. They don’t adapt well if you’re cut off suddenly at high speeds either.

Man… they use a metric of $2.57/day in 2023 dollars to define the level of extreme poverty? That’s $938.05 a year. Just wow.

Huge qol improvements in india https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZVKYYyig

PPP falls apart when you consider the price of consumer electronics, electricity, gasoline, airfare…

In the Dominican Republic you can’t get completely stable electricity. It just doesn’t happen without generators/batteries. Generators aren’t suddenly cheaper in DR. It’s 20DOP for 1kwh of electricity in DR, or $0.34 USD/kwh. I pay less in the greater Boston area. Wages there are way, WAY below 30k/year. The thought of having air conditioning at home is practically impossible for almost all who live there.

I love how you nitpicked the chile reference (with no counterpoint whatsoever) but it’s true across Latin America. Imported goods to poorer nations generally cost way above and beyond what the US pays…unless it’s prescription drugs because almost all other nations negotiate those prices to be much, much less than what the US pays (and only just started negotiating… for JUST Medicare.) I’m sure there are other examples as well. The PPP is so far apart on imports it’s insane. Often times things are sold in the US even if they are made locally because the price in the US is way above and beyond what the locals can afford.

The real rich

What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.

In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.

If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.

When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.

There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.

I can pretty much guarantee illegals don’t get worker protections so the law saying one thing or another really doesn’t matter.

Businesses can ignore most laws by default until someone sues them. This just removes the lawsuit for this specific thing. Work or die is the law.

most of the world

Countries that have recognized are in green: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_State_of_Palestine#/media/File:Palestine_recognition_only.svg

My second paragraph is basically: I have no faith in humanity coming out of all of it. I don’t think humanity as a whole has any chance of changing course because of how humans just are.

Maybe we’ll have runaway greenhouse gas causing catastrophic climate change. Maybe we’ll blow everybody up in what some might call world war 3. Maybe we’ll just have more and more humans be born until Earth can’t support practically any non-human, non-livestock life. Maybe we’ll have a biological outbreak that actually causes extremely high mortality rates. Maybe we’ll have a CME hit and wipe out all electronics on the majority of the developed world. There’s so many things that are more likely to happen than the majority of humanity changing course.

We can’t even stop two pointless wars or fix American politics. There’s no way humans can solve a global problem that requires believing in science and putting business owners second.