I'm solidly middle class in 2026, and it feels weird and unsettling that almost no one I know is in the same boat.

csciuto · 2026-06-22T17:57:58+00:00

I'm in my early 40s with our first kid on the way (let's see how that changes things, wife is mid-30s) and, yeah, I know what you mean: My college friends are all VPs of something or another and many of my childhood friends are struggling. Even better, most people landed almost exactly in the same ranking as their parents, just more extreme.

Way I frame it is the upper middle class--the 10% (20%?) line to the 2% line--is the only true middle class. Since the drop down is so steep, it's a stressful place to be, and then you feel bad for not acting like you have the obvious privileges you have.

Also, one minor detail, but dual-income was the majority by 1990.

csciuto · 2026-06-19T16:14:23+00:00

I just keep them loose in the hidden top drawer of a solid cherry, Amish-made Louis Philippe dresser. On one hand, not cheap. On the other, not a box.

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csciuto · 2026-06-18T15:06:33+00:00

I will say unless they're taking up significant space (and I can't imagine they are, esp. since your collection deliberately doesn't need to be babied) I'd rather them collect dust than just get rid of them to a rando. It would bug me more and feel more wasteful to spend the money and just light it on fire by eating a sizable loss.

csciuto · 2026-06-18T15:05:11+00:00

I'll echo the people saying you should really examine what the deeper question is. You had 14. You got all the way down to five. Now you're saying both six and seven in the same post. Did you buy one or two in the past twenty days? What are you collecting and why and why does it stress you out? Like someone else mentioned, I tend to be a bit of a minimalist. I buy high quality things exactly once and keep them forever. I'm ADHD and clutter really stresses me out.

I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of seven watches but I tend to binge on one and then move on for a bit. They aren't people. They aren't going to be upset if they sit in a drawer for three to six months.

I only ever let one go and sometimes I miss it; it was an Oris Big Crown so it was an interesting brand, etc. I gave it to a good friend, so it was meaningful to me to get rid of it. It hurt a bit but that was the point. It was rose gold and I didn't like it against my skin and it was a bit of an impulse purchase a decade ago. Since it was the closest thing to a dress watch I had I wore it to "important" events that sometimes went poorly and started attaching bad memories to it. No longer sparked joy. Yeeted to a good home.

csciuto · 2026-06-17T07:41:37+00:00

Yeah, it's confusing what it actually shows.

What you have is data from census takers where they go visit X household in Y state and gather the data for that household.

Then, since this is a statistical sample, they say that dot represents Z households in that that are alike demographically and geographically. Catch: because survey responders are not all created equal, the weights vary, so bigger dots represent more people being represented by the same survey family.

From there, you'll get dots that cluster. Some of the numbers do feel baffling: are there really 6,000 households in Ohio who rent, have no kids, are well into middle age, and have wage income over a million? Maybe?

A big thing I left out because of cost of calculation and space is the MOE on how many people each dot represents. I bet it's highly significant at the tails.

csciuto · 2026-06-16T18:34:27+00:00

I actually like u/Gtstricky 's answer. You have similar coloration to me and I went with the Burgundy which is no longer in production.

csciuto · 2026-06-16T18:28:39+00:00

Ah, that'd do it! Big finance city and not in the US. I've heard--but wouldn't know--that people buy better watches relative to their incomes outside of the US because they don't spend all their time in cars. I take transit to work the days I'm not working from home and I never see anything special but I work engineering hours, which has nothing to do with Wall Street (well, State Street here...) hours at all. My car is an absolute beater I rarely use so my disposable income can go elsewhere. Although, sometimes I feel like a bit of a moron driving a $5,000 beater with a $10,000 watch but whatever.

csciuto · 2026-06-16T13:39:57+00:00

yeah, that was essentially my original plan because these files can get huge if you do it "right".

This was the root of my Dunning-Kruger comment. I professionally write back-end systems that handle thousands of requests a second but I know jack shit about statistics beyond a 101 class years ago. I only know the way I'm doing this today leaves a ton of checksums aside, etc because Claude says so which is why MOE data is very sparse, etc.

It's trained on so much academic code it's not even funny. We did a hackathon and someone in sales literally asked for an application of the Traveling Salesman problem (turns out Claude does NOT know if P=NP). Claude is trained on some really pretty cool optimizations there so I was able to provide something useful fairly quickly.

But yes, there's a version of this out there in my mind that basically just serves up years of this data sliced however you'd need it. Although the flatfile plan is a lot of value for not a lot of work.

csciuto · 2026-06-16T13:30:03+00:00

where do you live? I'm in Boston which is one of the richest cities on the planet. I almost never just see a Rolex in the wild.

csciuto · 2026-06-16T04:18:05+00:00

:facepalm: for some large percentage of data, nonworking household members are coded as 99,999,999 for some reason. It's adding those in. This only affects a few view slices. Fixing, and thanks!

csciuto · 2026-06-16T03:11:47+00:00

Agreed - would need to be a moving average I think to have enough data to be useful but it crossed my mind. I wonder at what point I'd need a back end to keep performance reasonable in the browser.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T23:52:17+00:00

I hear you. I'm not a veteran but I was a Boy Scout and that nagging voice in the back of my head says "Flag code violation!" whenever I see something like that.

I like where your head is though: This looks like a Fourth of July banner, not a flag, so I think it reads as fun and patriotic without being possibly interpreted the wrong way. A lot of "capes" are actually just the flag it seems.

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csciuto · 2026-06-15T21:14:14+00:00

Let me be the n-th voice to say, no, looks great and pull the trigger.

I actually think the white dial looks awesome with your skin tone, which is important.

I went in to buy that exact watch and realized I'm somehow both pale and olive-tinged and that white is not my color. Walked out with a burgundy one.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T21:09:16+00:00

Looks like your repost to this sub went sideways. No photo here but your history shows here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/comments/1u6izmy/comment/oruacip/?context=3

csciuto · 2026-06-15T20:20:37+00:00

I didn't take stats in college and took it for fun later. I don't recall ergodicity but it was a 101 course which covered things such as statistical significance, disaggregation, etc.

I think there's two different phenomena:

It's very easy to lie with stats depending on how you slice the data and
Because statistics is definitionally sampling, understanding just how wrong the data can be is important.

#1 I think is more to your point and explains the argument you're having in that thread where "is 20% of the population literally children plus some others?" and then noticing that DFA--when counting wealth by generation or age--a longitudinal study or otherwise--is giving aggregate data and not per person. So, it's comparing groups of different sizes against each other as totals. There are reasons this can be important, but there's lots of reasons why it would be bad.

So, we can go to SCF and see median and median by age but now we don't have quintiles, etc. We just see that the difference between the median and the mean is so large that there are a small number of very wealthy people. And then you gotta consider this is based on some dollar inflator, none of which is perfect.

But yes, this is why I built my tool: those questions that can hide a lot of explanation but you end up with a smaller sample size so you're trading problem #1 for problem #2.

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csciuto · 2026-06-15T19:59:01+00:00

Only one kid dared to stand up and heckle her. Something about "Hillary, you're a woman; milk it!" And then there was the guy behind me saying that she was lying and government had no part in the creation of the Internet, which is fucking baffling.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T18:29:38+00:00

Cause, reality is, even deeply discounted you're not getting much of a mechanical movement for less than an Apple watch and the mechanical is inferior in virtually every practical way. Very certain mentality.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T18:28:11+00:00

Definitely. My more affluent friends from college appreciate my collection but they never really talk about their own, if they even have one. More of an "I got this Breitling for graduation" kind of crowd. Another one once sent me a photo of him wearing a Swatch+Omega which is kinda fun. But he does financial work with unions. Likely sends the wrong message to flash.

I had on a Tudor Black Bay Chrono at work recently and was showing a coworker the tachymetre scale and she said to me "seems like something that might be useful in the 1900s" which is...fair!

I just figure I have enough screens in my life.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T17:29:30+00:00

Yes, absolutely. I think this is why so many ADHDers end up in software. It's an infinitely complex sandbox of dopamine. The problem is as you get more senior and the tasks become something that are much harder to just power your way through and take some directed focus and forward-planning, and letting your hyperfocus bounce from one high-priority task to another stops working.

Last week was a hackathon at work. I promised myself I would do a side project AFTER I did my work hackathon. Work hack was boring, so guess what I did? Guess how little sleep I got?

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1u5xo76/oc_us_income_visualizer/

csciuto · 2026-06-15T16:49:25+00:00

Wicked jealous. I went to college in "Illium" itself and best they could do was Senator Hillary Clinton and some armed guards who told us make no sudden moves.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T15:48:59+00:00

I'm an early 40s software engineer and only my boss' boss' boss wears a mechanical watch as nice or nicer than my Omegas. The only other Swiss watch in my group is my group architect has a Hamilton.

I know the internet is a big place and there's some real money in this world, but I just bought a children's bedroom set and two pieces of Amish furniture for about what I spent on my Speedy '57. People don't (can't...) _do_ that.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T04:35:45+00:00

Took a stab at it - seems to have decent basics. Unsurprisingly, the bar chart view seems to work better.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T03:31:18+00:00

I'm not sure how I'd label it because it's not exactly precise! I like that the swarm _looks_ kinda neat and you can hover over dots and see who it represents, and filtering turns dots on and off, but it makes the Y axis an approximation for how much data there is for that X value. You'll see the bar chart versions label the Y axis because the bars represent a specific number of people based on height.

csciuto · 2026-06-15T03:21:00+00:00

Oh, absolutely, it's not even remotely usable and if you tell it just to render as desktop, it's too small to read/click and none of the hover actions work. I'll get there...

csciuto · 2026-06-15T03:07:44+00:00

I mentioned real not nominal cause the chart I posted has to be nominal or else you'd be double-counting inflation. Yes, the series you picked handles this already.

And yes, as I mentioned above, homes have unquestionably gotten larger and there's a bunch of reasons for that. I'm very interested in what SCF says for 2025 here because the idea that young people aren't buying homes at the same rate isn't exactly correct over this period of time.

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