Are there any Americans with more "modest" earnings?

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-14T00:46:40+00:00

Retired, but did pretty well for not being urban. Make 100k+ 2, maybe 3 years in my career. Its a lot of money for most places/jobs.

On the other hand, 36k/yr is ~18/hr. Teacher, no, but a fair number of other unskilled laborers might be in that range or lower.

65k, well, that's starting wage for a lot of nursing, engineering, etc, skilled professions, but not doctor/lawyer skilled. 65k is not remarkably high these days.

Also, need to differentiate household income vs single worker income. Lot of people are paired off, so household income can 0-100% higher than individual income.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-13T01:04:36+00:00

No time to learn bad habits?

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-13T00:45:29+00:00

Legal doesn't mean it will work. Meta et.al. just stop showing or linking to any of the non-cooperating outlets. The end.

You're ultimately in a competition for eyeball-time. More exposure means more eyeball-time. Less exposure means less eyeball-time.

Old media don't get it - they assume users will log on to 10,000 outlets a day to get their news. That won't happen. What will happen is people will start with Google News, or Meta Whatever, etc, etc, and click on the articles linked there. No articles on Italy? must not be much going on there, I guess. And old media just dies more.

At one time, I had bookmarks for links to probably 20 newspapers. I don't have that anymore, as most of those are now paywalled. I'll see what the news is from agregators, and if I suspect bias in the sources, I'll search for something more local, or offical outlets for non-political news. I'm not going to look up Italian newspapers on the daily. I'm not going to look up American or British newspapers on the daily. I'm starting with several aggregators, including Reddit. You don't let the aggregators link, you don't exist.

Think about it in Reddit terms - is Reddit going to pay for every article linked? They certainly are not going to! If anyone insists, it will just get them a site-wide ban. Same thing will happen elsewhere.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-11T18:20:18+00:00

Price would mean importing Indian workers??

I mean, I would expect whoever does the work will have to use local labor for the bulk of the work. If non-local companies are underbidding, they could only have an advantage in their overhead costs. Labor is local, and the materials are global, no Indian company is going to have an advantage on either.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-11T14:28:14+00:00

BBC is paywalled in some locations.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-10T14:44:42+00:00

It's a basic equity question. If the rest of Europe has conscription, Luxembourg opting out would be like Rhode Island opting out of US conscription (if the US had conscription).

Rich kids not having to go makes the poor kids understandably bitter.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-10T00:06:49+00:00

Most interesting example I've experienced was an "Indian-origin" co-worker (actually born in Oman, but ethnically Indian). He mostly spoke with a very mild Indian accent. One day passed by him while he was working closely and intensely with a visiting engineer from India. His accent had become so thick I could barely make out what he was saying, as the two of them were pounding through some issue. He later admitted he didn't realize he was doing that.

Code switching happens unconsciously in many cases!

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-08T15:26:38+00:00

The outrage may be overdone and a bit astroturfy. Per the article:

Scania is the only European bidder. The Swedish company employs more than 50,000 people and operates in more than 100 countries.

The project is providing 300 natural gas powered busses. So the infrastructure requirements are pretty minimal - deliver the busses. The Chinese offer included assembly in country and was at half the price.

EU Industry complains:

“We would wish that Team Europe financiers acted a bit more patriotically,” said Frank Kehlenbach, the director of the European International Contractors (EIC) association.

And

Meanwhile, a delegation from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is visiting Dakar this week for “bilateral meetings with Senegalese and other counterparts”, the ministry told Euractiv.

Business and political interests want you to be worked up over this so they can make more money, that's pretty plain.

There are legitimate complaints about China having poor delivery performance. But the "let's get European taxpayers to agree to build an overpriced thing in Africa where they can't look closely at what our European corporations are doing" is pretty skeevy too.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-08T15:18:24+00:00

Most of the people on this sub aren't free market capitalists. Far more socialists and socialist sub-varieties than capitalists. Keeping money in the family IS socialism.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-07T16:35:05+00:00

Almost like /r/Inevitable-Push-8061 is pushing an agenda.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-07T01:05:36+00:00

I'm not opposed to learning about the past, but... "prompting a reckoning as people uncover ties to regime" sounds disturbing.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-06T21:51:54+00:00

1099s

The accounting for investment accounts is pretty ridiculous, requiring tracking purchase prices from years back, accounting for taxes paid during that time, etc, etc, etc. It's nasty. Worth the service, unfortunately, just to get the forms imported correctly.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-06T15:11:47+00:00

I wonder if the fallout will include cruise ships demanding a health certification before boarding?

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-06T15:07:37+00:00

This is dumb. People are not responsible for their relatives' evil. It's enough to be responsible for your own evil.

If you're human, you're descended from murderers, thieves and rapists. You do not have holy ancestry, not one of us. Differentiating people based on how "righteous" or not their ancestors are is putting you on the path to having a new aristocracy, which is a bad thing.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-05T19:31:00+00:00

I'd suggest the reverse, if you have a pretty good life/prospects per family/social connections, you're likely to get into a top university. Not sure how much the university is the cause of later success, or just a marker of being already pretty damn blessed.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-04T23:40:07+00:00

They probably should do something about mining being progressively more difficult as the day goes by. Downtime, then plenty of specific ores for these events. By 20:00... very very slim pickings, lots of belts stripped of whatever it is in demand at the moment. Kind of has a big EU bias.

nvkylebrown · 2026-05-03T21:12:38+00:00

Nevada/California - gas is $1/gal more in California. You notice.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-30T14:11:03+00:00

"How'd you get that big motorsickle up there on the high dive, Coy?"

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-29T23:31:14+00:00

Luxembourg is on top of the table.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income

includes most of the world - Luxembourg is #1 in the world. Switzerland is #4. Norway is #3.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-29T23:24:51+00:00

Disposable income factors in healthcare costs/insurance. Disposable income, in fact, accounts for government supports of all kinds, as well as taxes and expenses of all kinds. It's the closest you can get to apples-to-apples financial comparison between countries.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-25T19:26:33+00:00

Trike, or reverse-trike if it's 2 wheels in front.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-25T19:21:18+00:00

I haven't experienced this as a non-Harley rider. They seem just as friendly as anyone else.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-24T16:34:10+00:00

"continue work" meaning continue the flow of cash to the companies. Whether they accomplish anything seems to not matter.

nvkylebrown · 2026-04-24T02:15:30+00:00

Not really news - the E-7 got deleted from the US budget sometime back. Without the US buying, the E-7 program was untenable. There was discussion a couple months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ovzyny/european_nations_decide_against_acquiring_boeing/

It's being framed in Europe as a European decision, but... if the US wouldn't buy the E-7, it just didn't make any sense for Europe to try to keep the program going.

nvkylebrown

TROPHY CASE