Whenever I hear the word ‘economy’ I replace it with ‘rich people’s yacht money.’ I feel that clarifies a lot of my opinions on the matter.

That’s quite frankly how it’s designed. Capitalism favors no one but those that have built it and continue building on it.

So, two points.

First, I’d encourage anyone to save. And as a place to keep savings, the market has done pretty well as to long-term returns. Having money in a portfolio isn’t incompatible with working for a living.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/10/31/what-would-happen-if-you-invested-100-a-week-in-th/

Let’s take a hypothetical investor named Annie as an example. At 25 years old, Annie has just landed her dream job as a chef, with a starting salary of $30,000 per year. She knows she may never make considerably more than that, but she doesn’t care – she loves her job! She also loves the idea of eventually retiring, though, and because the restaurant she works at doesn’t offer pension or retirement benefits, she knows she’s going to have to make that happen on her own. Living modestly, she’s able to set aside an extra $100 per week, putting that money into an S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.70%) index fund that conservatively returns an average of 9% per year.

How much will Annie have at the end of just 30 years? Incredibly, somewhere around $790,000.

Surprised? This is even more surprising: If Annie can keep finding that extra $100 per week for another 10 years, she’ll be sitting on roughly $2 million at the end of that 40-year stretch.

If she retires at 65, and you figure 2% inflation and use their 9% pre-inflation return, those savings generate a post-inflation maybe $140,000/year for her to live on without cutting into the portfolio in real terms.

But, okay, second, set investment aside. Let’s just say “does the economy matter”?

Like, if there’s a recession, GDP contracts. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people look at that and say “Well, that’s just some abstract number. It’s got no effect on me.”

Inflation, on the other hand, clearly causes prices to rise.

I was looking at a poll from a bit back talking about how most people – especially in Germany and the US, two of the three countries polled – deeply dislike inflation. They would much rather have a recession than see high inflation.

In general, economists are going to go the other route. They’ll say that recessions are really bad.

So, during Biden’s (and Trump’s, during COVID) time in office, a number of policies were made (not necessarily by them) that tended to avoid recession, but encourage inflation.

Polling shows that people were unhappy with Biden on the economy, because high (well, as the US goes) inflation showed up during his time in office.

Biden kept quoting figures that are generally considered to be very positive. Low unemployment, for example. But…there was that inflation.

When GDP drops – and a sustained decline in GDP is what constitutes a recession – it’s indicating that there’s less economic activity going on. What that tends to represent is a lot fewer people working – a lot of layoffs. Companies going under. Maybe furloughs or reduced hours, in some cases. The impact there is that a lot of people have their income go away or be cut, a lot of things get upended.

With inflation, on the other hand, wages are sticky, tend to take a while to catch up, but do catch up. There aren’t huge job losses. Things more-or-less keep moving along as they were.

I don’t think that Trump or Biden would have acted wildly different on the matter. You could swap their periods in office, and both would have followed their recommendations, which would have been to favor policy that encouraged inflation and avoided recession, though then the inflation would have shown up when Trump was in office. They’re not doing it because the economists advising them have some special love of having Americans pay higher prices, but rather because they’d consider that preferable to a recession and the problems that accompany that. Also, neither drives the Federal Reserve, which is what adopted an important chunk of that inflationary policy. In the absence of the pandemic, neither would have wanted inflation – it’s not that high inflation is desirable, just that it’s preferable to the alternative of recession.

I too do not understand social media. The best I get is it’s about people shouting into a void and hoping someone else heard you to interact with it, by repeating it, liking it, or shouting back at you.

Hashtags are the only way to organize these posts and you need to add them or no one else will hear your shouts into the void.

Interestingly, I think people like you and me use Lemmy because one of the same underlying reasons as social media people:

Either:

1. Endless amounts of stuff that speaks to your interest. (With us it’s stuff like technology. On Social media, people are “interested” in what others are up to.

2. Getting likes/dislikes. Even though likes aren’t important on Lemmy, I notice in my usage that I do subconsciously get the same dopamine hits jf a post gets liked a lot, just like Social Media does. It’s less aggressive on Lemmy because you don’t get alerts for it, but it does factor in on engagement.

3. Engaging in conversations/discussions with other people.

4. Sharing things you find interesting yourself

The content might be different, but the underlying principles are really close. Social Media is actually really close to how forums work at it’s core.

But I know this is an unpopular opinion. And no, I wouldn’t call Lemmy Social Media per se. But the line is more blurry than I’d like to admit if I look at my time spent with Lemmy.

Oh. My. God. Can fucking apps learn that when I say “block” and “less like this” I fucking mean it? Don’t show me fucking anything about baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball, and especially not American football. I AM NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE.

Also, I have to block a large fraction of my social feeds at certain times of the year because all they talk about are sports.

I’ll never understand letting the outcome of a game make or break my mood in the following days.

I spent >10 years of my youth playing a sport competitively. I don’t think I ever watched a professional game to completion. Unlike pretty much all my teammates, I just could not have cared less.

Play the sport myself? Fun, sure! Watch someone else play? Uh, why?

I think it’s great that people enjoy watching sports. I dunno why but it just bored the hell out of me.

AI for me as well. I’ve played with it a little and it’s kinda fun. Every company is pushing AI now including in areas where it doesn’t make any sense or is many years away from being useful. I’m also seeing a lot of developers being assigned to use AI without any directions on what to use it for.

I’m far enough along in my career I don’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. If it’s ever good enough to take my job I’ll be happily retired writing software for fun and living my life without AI. I just don’t have any interest.

One would love renting because they’ve managed to find the sweet spot that is an area where things are relatively quiet and peaceful. Management actually cares. Tenants keep to themselves. Things are relatively retained in condition.

But if you’re living in a complex opposite of that, yeah you’ll hate everything about renting. Tenants who make you wonder how they scrounge enough money to pay monthly rents with how they behave. Management who you wonder how they keep their jobs with how they handle things and allow said problematic tenants to come rent from them. You’ll be getting e-mails of management telling you “oh, package room has to be monitored now because package theft is now a problem” or “we’ll be closing the pool down for the rest of the season because children and tenants can’t behave”

And just a bunch of other issues.

Seems like you’re describing renting in an apartment complex or similar. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison to owning a single family home.

Not that you’ve raised bad points. Renting does have the benefits you’ve described, though lawn care in my experience is hit and miss. The issue is getting these benefits must cost something. So long as having them doesn’t mean the rent is double the mortgage, then it’s worthwhile.

Otherwise, renting is just another more expensive option for all the people that can’t afford the upfront cost of getting into the housing market.

Which country? In France and Germany tenants are expected to do all of that by themselves. On top of financing their landlord’s cocaine, of course.

Edit: actually in Germany it’s often the opposite, landlords will tell you about how difficult it is to own a place while sucking your blood off. Shitty country

I shovel the driveway when it snows, takes 20 minutes and is good exercise. I don’t pay a repair guy to fix stuff, I do it myself. I mow the lawn once a week and it’s a nice chance to get outside for half an hour. I don’t maintain a swimming pool since I don’t have one. If I have problems with my neighbors I make them brownies and talk to them. And all the money I pay into my mortgage is going into an asset, not some other fuckstick’s pockets.

Ugh, yep, I’m far from alone in saying I’d really rather not have any

Add getting married to that for me. I enjoy not being legally bound to another human

I think the silent majority feels like this.

“Eh, not my cup of tea, but you do you”

I think constantly bringing it up to people all the time is more of a disservice.

The trans community is tiny, I’m an almost 50 year old trans woman transitioned over 20 years ago. The reason we have the rights we do is because it’s “brought up all the time”. When I transitioned, it was rarely brought up, this was because most people were scared of the social and economic consequences of doing so. This is all changing because we talk about it rather than be quiet and let people keep us down. I’d imagine even you might have more negative views of trans people if the only exposure you had was from talk shows promoting us as freaks, this is how it was before.

Other than that, your attitude is fine, not everyone needs to be interested.

Like the saying goes:

Everything I know about the Kardashians I learned against my will.

Actually swimming in the ocean is a pretty unique experience, but it does kind of require you to be a strong swimmer.

Sounds like you need to find a less popular beach

I think people are too dumb to realize places in the rurals must have them. Like in Alaska, it isn’t optional with those bears.

I’ve come across a black bear while hunting small game and was very close in dense brush. People that have never experienced that kind of interaction lack the relevant info to have a say. While at the same time, after moving to Los Angeles for a couple of decades, owning guns here is for people with mental issues. One law can not cover all situations; it is impossible to federate. It is used as a distraction topic to avoid legislating reasonably against the loopholes of the oligarchy. It is the same reason why the news cycle camps on an election long before it is a relevant issue; there is no pressure to create reasonable legislation that would stop the privateers.

Of course, but the people who are constantly talking about “Stocks” and “The Market” are usually constantly trading, wheeling, dealing, doing all sorts of shit and then trying to brag about how smart they are cause they’re “hustling” while… barely keeping up with or not keeping up at all with those broad index funds you already mentioned.

Saving accounts are just a great resource for banks. Their returns are always less than inflation so you’re basically always losing money with them.

Because being stuck in the past is generally not a good thing

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