Darkpriest

I'm more of a monocle and stache guy, or sweatpants, rough week old beard guy. Depends on the mood i guess

How sustainable demographically is a system, when you have people in labor force for about 40-45y, while outside of labor force expanded from ca 15-20y to 40-50y and at the same time generation replacement happens every 30y instead of 20y and it is usually below the 2.0 kids per couple? The old days had subcultures being more promiscous, and it still was not entirely risk free. The advancments in medicine enabled more promiscous life style as the biggest risk of an adventorous intercourse (a child) has been mitigated to extremely low levels. This factor enabled women to go early in the workforce and made them more masculine as they got drawn into corporate cogs. Now however you start seeing an outpour of a generation of unfullfilled expectations, where creating a family went into a backlog of things to do somewhere in the future, but now there are few men interested in pair bonding via marriage (see falling marrige rates), and there is an abundance of free, cheap sexual experiences, as long as you are somewhat tall and can make a 100k per year. You removed incentives for men to get married and have families, you told women that its unfashionable and weak to have family and kids early, and put them through emasculating, highly competitive and time consuming corporate culture , made men and women compete for jobs, which historiaclly were better paid, but now they stagnated in salary growth due to oversupply of workforce (also, women rarely date down status/financially wise) , and you wonder why people have no money while they live 'single' lives?

Not many, although there is a load of them going into architecture and interior design (they overrepresent there)

This will be a bit unpopular, but the whole point of enabling women into the workforce, was to keep the wages low. Suddenly you have more people competing for various level white collar jobs. You will notice that it in the white collar, most post uni jobs stall in growth of wages (you can see this now as more and more people are entering stem/tech jobs, the pace of money making is stalling) On the other hand, jobs with vast overrepresentation of men (construction, plumber, electrician, truck driver, mariner) are keeping up with cost growths if not even outpacing them, and they have no burden of debt. The guy, who was placing tiles in my house was earning much more than some asaociates or even senior associates of simple desk jobs in a bank. Heck, he was making more than supervisors and junior managers. EDIT: and unfortunately social media do matter, if the current high schooler girls select their profession of choice to be an "influencer". They don't get that most of those 'careers' have a hard expiration date and often do not bring much money other than a season or two of novelty. People are urged to go in debt, consume and not delay any gratifications. I do agree, that we probably should not grow in numbers and more likely even contract to give some breathing space to mother earth, however our debt driven economy model, which requires continous growth of consumption and by extension populace, would simply collapse on its face if we cannot keep up minimal growth at or slightly above the replacement rate. People should have kids in mid 20s at the latest, but hook up cultures, 'self-gratification' and destruction of a family unit as a base line unit in the society make the future really bleak. Fun fact - China, which empowered women the most in the past and had one child policy is now figjtining 'feminism' and is urging people to couple up and have 2 childre per family

Perhaps change the mind of natives and promote having families and kids? One thing that i hold a distain for a modern feminism is that from going for equal rights and opportunitiea, they made it 'unfashionable', 'weak', 'servile' to be a mother in a regular family unit, and that it promotes promiscuity among women (have fun, you have plenty of time), when in fact the one thing that women don't have, is time as the biology does not care about what you believe in. The second nail in the coffin is the rise of social media and promoting shalow and dumb behavior. Dumb things on the internet get more clicks and views and likes and you get rewarded for that with money. This means that responsibility and family life are not rewarding for the 'me me me' braindeads

I have a CC with like 2k limit, which i pay off regularly, sometimes leaving some used balance after a minimal payment for a mibth or two. Used for some streaming service and occasional purchase via interwebs. I also have like a 10k limit within my debit account, in case of some unspeakable emergency, where I could not pull my savings due to some liquidity issue. Just work on your credit scores from early years.

So, I expect the midterms will be a reason, while we will see another cash injection into the economy by Dems. With narrow margins it's possible that they mighy lose both House and Senate. https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/white-house-downplays-transitory-inflation-democrats-quietly-panic-over-impact-midterm @Guard Dog would probably be very happy.... Until Trump 2024 ...

Guess this would speak closer to your beliefs. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/secretis-out

Interesting topic, and I believe that if you are above a certain size and weight, you should pay more for the air travel. https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/airlines-may-start-weighing-passengers-amid-obesity-crisis

So is this how you turn a decent City into a next Baltimore? https://www.theepochtimes.com/portland-police-union-president-says-city-is-on-the-precipice-of-a-gang-war_3816766.html

Depends how you view various monarchs, and their rules.

IIRC it was one and the same. It contained a lot of press on premise.

Imagine if China started bombing their muslim minority

Unorthodox opinion on the wealth accumulation. https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/praise-1-they-provide-improving-standards-living-99-percent While in principle I agree that this worked in the past, as wealth was built from investments, now it does not and will not work that well going forward, due to which investments return the most profit in the reality of free money provided by FED and tech leap displacing simple jobs and offshoring more complex jobs.

Nah, theyl shoot down NASA copters and claim It's aliens

When I see British and diplomacy, I can't resist to reference to this. https://youtu.be/VOdnISwLkSs

@Ben No.4 To be honest, it's been a while since any topic of high speed rail popped up on any serious level of decision making discussion. There is a lot to take on, as tracks in different countries of EU are often incompatibile and to build a high speed rail infrastructure, which could compete with conveniece of air traffic, that would take trillions of EUR. Although if any money printing could be excused, this type of a project would be one to get a pass from me. The infrastructure could also revitilize economcially some smaller hubs along the rail path, something, which air traffic would never do. Air traffic would be fine for travels outside of EU, should that ever be made reality.

I've told this somewhere last year, that there are rules across various companies, not to store non-US related sensitive data in US and if in the cloud service, just stream it as needed from other nodes. US and privicy of data are oxymorons.

Before you will start virtue signaling, stop outsourcing pollution intensive jobs and stop buying services/products and components from pollution creating countries like China and India. Shut down air traffic over Germany as well If you will do that, then I'll believe that you are taking care of green issues seriously, instead if virtue signaling for feel good points, while still contributing indirectly by increased consumption of high energy footprint products and services.

@Guard Dog This is also an interesting perspective. A bit overblown IMO, but in the right direction https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-consumer-confidence-plunges-inflation-fears-soar

I'm happy, as I shorted along with funds on the tech index prior to CPI print (i expected it to be higher than consensus, but not that high on MoM basis) - Ez money (due to regulatory reasons i can invest in indexes only via third parties at their fixed conditions and with limited amount of monies). And now stocks are getting pumped again, as if there was no bad data in the last 3 days. Market is sure FED will backstop and start buying stonks before large players would go broke and in the meanwhile it will keep markets high on free money. Not to mention, they don't want people to pull out cash from the markets as they would rather have inflation of assets values than that money increasing velocity on the MainStreet economy and skyrocketing inflation. Lets see what June will bring with the next CPI print and added typical Q end volatility with realizng gains. It will also be interesting to see if Dems and Biden will be forcing the issue with more debt and sending printed money to the streets.

If not for DnD, I'd probably forget about thr word as well

If you guus think that YoY 4.2 CPI with MONTHLY 0.9 CPI was bad, the front running YoY PPI just hit 6.2, with MONTHLY core PPI going 0.7 for a second month in a row. Prepare your wheelbarrows. Foreign buyers reluctant to buy 30Y TSY bonds, sending cost of long term debt higher. If that attiitude will spillover to 10Y TSY with next CPI print and Dems + Biden will still want to run some high cash printed money fueled "infrastructure bill" or worse - another run of stimmy checks, expect some pain. Even this piece of crap notices the 'speedbumps' https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/553222-biden-spending-plans-hit-speed-bumps

Actually, the tax to be fair should be linear. I recall something around 17% was a good number. Make sure that all income types are taxed, and that any offshore income is taxed as well witha difference in tax rates between locations. How you help the people on the lower range of income is to assist in keeping prices for their regular spendings low. Some examples Have 0% sales tax on retail groceries, and have 30% sales tax on yachts, jewelry, etc. Make sure that you push a personal transactional wealth tax for any goods/assets bought abroad, which would meet certain criteria and differentiate those with various rates. Have some rent assist payment program for people with low incomes. Address housing market price bubbles by incresing tax rate on all owned real estate with each extra purchase beyond 2 or 3 and make the base dependant on the current market value or some combination of that. There are many options to differentiate income sources for the budget, but you would not penelize people for investing in themselves and in the economy with a sloppy and an unfair solution of a progressive rate tax. However, first you'd need to turn off the printing machine at FED and near 0 cost ez money for the top 1%

@Hurlshot @Guard Dog Also