Is anyone else in the country seeing their net worth jump 150% since COVID?

In net worth? Sure, -$1000 is technically a 150% jump from -$400.

Yeah, the people bitching about the tax obligation are basically just angry they don’t get to see their stocks grow tax free just because they happen to live somewhere else, and they try to get people on their side by misleading others about the way the US taxes citizens abroad.

This particular scandal was worse than you think. It wasn’t just that she was suspected of sleeping with her bodyguard, but it’s that she was abusing her position to make young female staffers communicate work stuff through her father or through her husband (neither of whom were government employees) so that they could sexually harass them. It’s fucked up.

If it were just shitting where she ate, it wouldn’t even register in this administration. This was worse.

I think Sundays is the day when many of his closest advisers take some or all of the day off, so he’s just wandering without the distractions that normally keep him busy.

It’s cheaper to pay cash than use insurance.

Yes, for most people, in most years. But the cost of health care tends to be very, very unevenly distributed. A person might see medical bills of less than $1000 per year for 20 years and then get a single $1,000,000 year. So at that point, it’s an annualized cost of $50,000 per year, even if most years it’s about $1,000. Some estimates are that 10-30% of all medical spending in the US is in the last year of life.

Many believe that because of this distribution, health insurance should primarily be a catastrophic care model where most people pay a premium that doesn’t cover anything for the first few thousand, then covers a percentage of the cost up to the out of pocket maximum of like $15,000 or so for a family, but does cover everything after that. For a typical household, being able to predict annual healthcare expenses for the entire year is very useful.

And personally, I’m pretty sympathetic to this catastrophic care model as a short term transition to an all payer model that looks like Switzerland’s system (private insurance, private providers, mandatory coverage, strict price controls, and subsidies for anyone who can’t afford the normal premiums).

The thing is, when someone is bad at many different parts of their job, it’s easier to build a coalition of people who each want him removed, for their own reasons.

To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

• Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
• Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
• Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
• Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

It’s not actually a clear inverse relationship on the individual level, even if the data shows a correlation at the national level.

There are a few things happening that complicate the analysis at the individual level, too:

• Wealth/income are correlated with age, and 40 year olds tend to have both higher incomes and lower fertility rates than 25 year olds.
• Wealth also correlates with race, for better or for worse, and there have always been persistent differences in birth rates by race.
• The sample sizes aren’t big enough to show whether the very rich (95th+ percentile) actually reverse the trend, to where being richer is correlated with higher birth rates, where the curve ticks back upward at very high incomes.
• The correlation is actually the other direction when looking at the individual incomes in certain countries (Netherlands, Sweden, Norway), and the effect is stronger when looking at men and their incomes.

Other country level data also suggest that there are big cultural factors in birth rates as well.

All in all, the relationship between income and fertility is complicated, with lots of other factors at play.

I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

Still interesting to see how it is implemented in neighborhoods and buildings that are over 150 years old. I think the Smithsonian museums in our capital are actually the most interesting examples, because many are old buildings whose historical character were preserved, but where wheelchair ramps, railings, and elevators were tastefully and functionally installed many decades or more than a century after the building was originally constructed.

And perhaps the best thing about the ADA is the sidewalk requirements. It doesn’t much matter why a sidewalk developed a raised crack when the ADA requires that it be fixed.

I’m not even disabled, but I’ve pushed baby strollers in different cities (including outside the US) enough to realize how nice it is to be in a city where all the sidewalks and public buildings are ADA compliant.

Lots of non-American banks don’t want to deal with the rules, so it’s easier for them to just say that they won’t open accounts for Americans.

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it’s legal and justified discrimination.

I wonder how those specific buyers’ household incomes are. Part of the “k shaped recovery” from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

Every once in a while there are multiple parties structuring a deal where someone is left with a bad deal when it’s all said and done. As a consumer, you just have to make sure it’s not you.

But take, for example, the early days of Moviepass. You pay a cheap subscription to a service, and they buy you unlimited mobile tickets at the theater. Too good to be true in the long term, but in the short term it was a good way to spend some money that venture capitalists were giving away basically for free.

Businesses aren’t always smart. Sometimes they make financial mistakes and it’s your duty as a responsible consumer to punish those businesses for those mistakes.

In the case of dealer/manufacturer/financing incentives and the individual salesman commission, sometimes the kickback/fee scheme leaves someone else holding the bag. If you can negotiate a lower sticker price because it comes with some predatory terms on financing, but there’s no penalty for prepayment, it might make the most sense to take the low sticker price (made possible by the lender paying the dealer a kickback for the loans), finance at high rates, and then pay the whole thing off as soon as you can, so that you get the “discount” without having to pay high interest/fees, then you walk away with a good deal in exchange for just a little bit more hassle and paperwork. Sometimes the incentives swing the other way, too, where the lender is affiliated with the manufacturer and needs to juice sales volume by offering below-market rates on financing. As long as you can actually see how everything works and you can find the pain point, it may be possible to get a good deal and dump the bad deal on some faceless corporation for them to worry about.

Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).

Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.