Stronger Than You

being unemployed is rad but being unemployed in a world that treats employment as a necessity that completes you as a person while also having zero access to unemployment benefits is maybe not so good

It's funny how we watched younger generations' attitudes towards work shift so rapidly over the last few years, when everyone started realizing with low pay and high COL and no pensions or benefits, the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze, that literally every media outlet started pushing articles on why job hopping and quiet quitting (i.e. doing your job and going home) is bad, and how the push for RTO is good, actually, and we were having none of it because billionaires were buying megayachts and private jets while we were getting evicted from our homes with skyrocketing rents.

It's a weird dichotomy where society insists you have to work to eat, but you bust your ass over a grill 40+ hours a week and you can't afford the food you cook, and meanwhile some CEOs are gutting Sears and Toys R Us and Red Lobster and getting rewarded millions for destroying perfectly functional businesses. This is what the world considers valuable work? You'll forgive me if I'm skeptical of the whole arrangement.

Let's examine this just a little bit. What was going on 4 years ago? That's right, we were in the middle of the pandemic, very few people were driving, and the unemployment jumped dramatically. That's your first problem. When you have low demand, you have low prices.

Do you think a president is the reason gas is high or low? Technically, the economy is better than it's been in decades, however, inflation -which was bad here, but so much better than most of the world, and decades of virtually stagnant wages have made American's buying power almost non-existent. Honestly, despite inflation, wages are rising - something that almost never happens when you have republican administrations - well, not for the last forty years anyway.

Currently gas is high for two main reasons. First, Russia is at war with one of our allies and we have a worldwide embargo (discounting a few nations) on their stuff. Add in that we also have an embargo here on Iranian and some Venezuelan oil, and you can see why our gas prices are higher. Plus, you then need to add in the fact that Saudi Arabia has convinced OPEC to reduce output to raise prices. Hey, free market economy at work for you there.

The second reason gas prices are high here is because just over a decade ago the Obama administration went along with the oil companies and decided to lift our moratorium on selling American oil overseas. In the Seventies when America first had problems with OPEC, we decided that any oil drilled here in America had to be sold here. That made for great reserves, but because every administration has to pander to fossil fuel companies, Obama gave in. Right now we are producing more oil than ANY country in the world, including Saudi Arabia. If we were still only selling it here, I can guarantee you prices would be lower.

Despite this, there is a third reason that helps keep gas prices higher in our country. Forty years ago this country had about 200 oil refineries. Oil came in and gas, diesel, and kerosine went out. Today, I believe we have about 120 of them. The vast majority are old, and we aren't generally building new ones because everyone is worried about the health problems that happen when you live near them. Once a year they have to be shut down and cleaned up (January through March is when this usually happens). Many of these refineries aren't running at top capacity anymore. The vast majority of oil drilled in Alaska is not refined in America. Some of it is done overseas and then shipped back for sale here.

So, yes, four years ago gas was almost certainly less than it is now, but we aren't in a mirror situation to what we were then. If all things were equal, gas prices between then and now would be commensurate. Don't let people fool you.

Reblogging just for this response like trump was in office for 4 years and gas only dropped because demand wasn't there use your heads people

Meanwhile in France:

That little girl is going places

I know more about economics than AOC and my knowledge on economics is on a high school level. Its actually embarassing how little she knows about this shit. But hey, expecting a socialist to know about economics is like expecting a fish to know what a desert is.

Much of the ocean is a desert

You know what? Let’s use the allowance example again to make it even clearer.

Let’s pretend we have an allowance tax bracket with a 70% tax on money received after a certain point. To keep things simple, we’ll make the limit $90.

If a kid does chores and earns $10 in allowance, they get $10. They’re not going to be affected by the 70% tax.

If a kid does chores and earns $50, they get $50. They also aren’t in the 70% tax bracket, even though they make five times as much money as the kid making $10.

If a kid does chores and earns $100 in allowance, then they’re in the allowance tax bracket with the 70% tax.

$100 minus $90 is $10. This is the part that’s going to be taxed 70%.

70% of $10 is $7.

So the kid getting $100 in allowance will have $93 after the 70% tax takes its share.

Now, I’d never impose such a thing on actual kids. All of this is a thought exercise.

But if it were real, the kid making $10 and the kid making $50 would probably be kind of mad if the kid getting $93 was bitching about being short $7.

Also, can we talk about how taxes are used to pay for things for the benefit of society - roads, schools, libraries etc. so to further the above example, the parents aren’t just pocketing that money themselves just to be mean and selfish, they might use it to pay for a Netflix subscription that the whole family can watch.

PROGRESSIVE TAX ISNT FUCKING RADICAL we study it in highschool economics class for fucks sake

Also even like. Economically. It’s better to give money to poor people. That’s basic Keynesian economics.

Give $600 to someone with no money and they will put it back into the economy, buying groceries, clothes, accommodations, maybe some small luxuries. Give $600 to a rich person and it goes into their bank accounts and just stays there being useless.

If you give a poor person $20, that same $20 will be spent easily 10x over, by 10 different people, in 10 different businesses- within a week.

1- poor guy buys groceries at a local bodega.

2- the bodega owner pays his employees from the cash in the register.

3- bodega employee goes to Starbucks and tips the barista in cash.

4- the barista owes their roommate from lunch last week and pays them back

5- roommate buys something from an indie creator on Etsy

6- Etsy creator splurges on takeout & tips in cash

7- the takeout delivery driver fills up on gas

8- gas station manager (who got paid from the register) takes their kid to the ice cream truck

9- Ice cream truck driver buys a new tire and gets an oil change

10- mechanic gets lunch on a shift

....and so on.

Giving money to poor people is the single best way to stimulate and energize the economy... because poor people do something with money that rich people don’t- THEY FUCKING SPEND IT.

[ID: A tweet from two people whose info has been blocked out. The original tweet reads, "Give $600 to a poor person and it's gone in a week. Give $600 to a rich person & it's multiplied 10X in a few years or less."

The reply reads, "Here, let me fix that for you. 'Give $600 to someone with no money and they have no choice but to use it to survive. Give $600 to someone whose needs are already met and they can sit on it all they want.' FFS are we really this dense?" /end ID]

Image description by @caainhurst

Suddenly all those Hinterlands quests to go round up a random farmer’s druffalo don’t  seem so silly.

Dragon Age Inquisition - doing something right.

(source)

Sigrid Ellis understands my heart

I cannot take your baronial war seriously

@kawuli i don’t know a single work the tweets talk about but this is amazing and my brain is screaming at me to send it to you

EXCELLENT

I feel like my fandom niche is excessive worldbuilding and periodic yelling about farming and you know what I’m fine with that

“We have the tax records!”

truuuuuth

rich people:

millennials:

I am fairly sure there are other explanatory factors for a dropping life expectancy, such as skyrocketing obesity rates and no one exercising enough. There’s not much evidence that increases in the quantity of working hours is linked to a dropping life expectancy.

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for folks in office jobs:

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ya ever hear of researching shit before you embarrass yourself?

The reason most millennials don’t make a scene when an establishment doesn’t treat them right is because we function more on positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement. For Boomers, they can make a scene because they know negative reinforcement gets them what they want; they want to PUNISH these establishments or workers, but Millennial purchasing patterns are very different.

Growing up in the computer age, we’ve become masterful at filtering junk information, and that includes advertising. It doesn’t matter how much a politician or restaurant or whatever memes, we’ll find them funny, but we’re still not going to shop there or give them our money of we dislike them. The way brands become successful with Millennials is actually just word of mouth.

So when an establishment treats us poorly, we don’t make a scene. We simply never go back and don’t tell our friends about it. Conversely, places that treat us well we immediately go tell others about.

The simplest ways to get Millennials to support your business is to give them good economic value for what you sell (Boomers can think we’re irresponsible, but we’re actually quite thrifty), you have to treat us with dignity, but ALSO, you have to treat your WORKERS with dignity. Unlike Boomers who get off on laughing at someone working at McDonald’s, we’ve all had to work shitty, underpaying jobs and we don’t like when we go to an establishment and see workers mistreated and poorly paid, because WE’VE BEEN THERE, and we don’t want to contribute to that gross abuse of the working class.

These rich CEOs can complain that Millennials have “no brand loyalty” or that we’re “killing XYZ industry,” but the truth is that selling to us consistently requires ethical business practices that most of these companies are unwilling to partake in.

Wow I have a degree in economics and studied this stuff for years and years and read up on it all the time and this still impressed me. This was such an enjoyable read and all TRUE. Fuck

3 reasons millennial shaming needs to stop now

At least half of older millennials aren’t getting a taste of the American Dream

Right now roughly half of 30-year-olds make more money than their parents did when they were the same age, according to a December paper on social mobility. A separate study from the Guardian published in March found that Americans under 30 are already poorer than retirees — despite the fact that they’re working.

There are two main reasons that Americans born in the 1980s face higher hurdles than their parents, the researchers found.

Millennials inherited a vastly wider wage gap between the rich and poor

A separate study released on Tuesday also found that income inequality has grown far faster than previously thought: In fact, half of the country has seen stagnant wages since 1980, while the wealthiest Americans have seen incomes skyrocket.In the last 3 ½ decades, the gap between what the richest 1% makes and what the bottom 50% earns has grown nearly threefold. 

Globally, young people are increasingly subsidizing the elderly

Call it a thank you, despite the economic lot they’ve inherited: Across the globe, millennials are increasingly likelier than previous generations to pass financial resources to older groups — beyond what they receive. Read more