rexxit

Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.

I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.

One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.

Another point I'd like to sneak in is that there's almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today's equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn't working the way we expect. The same opportunities don't exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.

Edit: and it's not just houses, it's the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.

I've seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you're rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don't have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.

Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with "wealth" may not have to work at all.

People don't become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn't really classify as normal income.

Edit: It's like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it's not classified as income. Meanwhile you're going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don't or can't tax wealth.

Edit2: we've got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you're not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.

Totally agree. Income isn't wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of "millionaire" when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn't even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly "six figures" income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.

Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.

Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.

https://newfastuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fxy2rtr1ec651.png

And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.

I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it's worth making this point: "NIMBY" as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:

There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into "low cost housing" or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.

These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don't like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.

Do you oppose development? NIMBY!

Do you support development? NIMBY!

Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.

I think it's bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I'm sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a "NIMBY", I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.

I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you're making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I'm experiencing the "real thing" based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that's what you seem to have implied.

I agree that we probably don't have a common definition of good or bad transit.

I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.

Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?

I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.

phallacy

Nice.

Your argument parallels the no true Scotsman fallacy much closer than you realize.

You: no Scotsman would commit such a crime

Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime

You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime...

Compare:

You: buses are great!

Me: I take buses and they suck!

You: good buses are great, you just aren't taking the good ones...

It's exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn't a good one and therefore doesn't reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn't a true Scotsman, and therefore you're always right.

you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view

I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.

I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren't many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don't own cars and don't drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.

It sounds like you just don't like cities or being around too many other people.

No argument there.

It's hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It's hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I've heard from the zealots.

I'm trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it's intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.