Hey, hey, stop right there. What I know is not morals, they are obviously natural facts, while anyone who thinks different must be the taliban! /s

I would like to thank you as well. It's not often to hear rational discussion. Sorry to hear your travel and lack of sleep, hopefully you are getting to a better place.

Ah, sorry on the luck bit as well. People call everything luck now so its hard to tell any more. Yes, lottery now that is luck.

I agree the toast bit is a proxy for quite a bit. I can surely understand how it can sound bad to someone who that is their one luxury or anyone who does it in a sustainable way for themselves. The problem is there are people who wildly overspend on such things. My best friend from high school wrecked his finances into his mid 30s by such things. It took working with him for years till he didn't feel dirt poor on a solidly middle-class income. The big problem for him didn't end up being the big things it was just a wave of small things like this. Just always eating out (which is what I usually think of when I think of avocado toast) can be a huge chunk of a middle-class budget. Yes, the $12 seems small until it happens 3 times a day, day in and day out for years.

As for saving up the money for a down payment, I brown-bagged it for 5 years to save enough and then had to wait for the right conditions to make buying feasible. It was eventually worth it however. I think the biggest hardship in your example is the inflated cost of housing. I think something needs to be done to ensure there are good starter houses available.

On the 20% I apologize as I was obviously unclear. My point was to tease apart the -someplace to go after failure- from the -huge loan-. Having a good support system that would help you if everything went wrong (a couch and some cold leftovers, I remember those days) might be more common in upper income brackets but my experience is that it's not much more common. The 20% was just meant to show that a significant portion of the population is already in such a situation.

I agree the $300k is a lot of money. At this point I can't imagine giving that much to my children. My parents never could have afforded such a thing however if they could have I am sure my father never would have allowed it. At the time I didn't understand his views but I think my father was a pretty shrewd judge of character. For every Musk or Bezos there seems to be 9 Hunter Bidens who would blow it, literally. I don't know that anyone can tell who will rise up and who will fall apart before it happens (much less reliably guide them). I don't know for sure that the money causes such destruction, but it does seem to often light such things off. If I had that amount of money to give I can't think of a single friend who I would want to jeopardize it with.

As for receiving it, I don't know. I would like to think that everything would have been basically the same. However, some part of me knows this is just hubris. I don't think I could have survived collage with that amount of money taunting me from the bank. I know I wouldn't have taken some of the crummy jobs I took to work my way through college. I think, like many lotto winners, I would have been suckered into a bad situation and lost it. However, worse is that I think I would have lost many of the lessons that I learned in life. Is there some way you could be protected from this? I don't know, so much of life seems to be defining yourself by rising to the struggle you find yourself in.

As for my situation I won't do details but my parents started as poor as you can get and I lived through their struggles into the middle class. I grew up mostly in the lower middle class and would say I was probably right in the middle of middle class when I graduated high school. I was given a similar beater as you but in high school so that I could transport myself to school and get a job. I can't remember a time I wasn't embarrassed by my parent's car or mine but proud of what we could do with whatever we had.

Thank you for the conversation, it has been an all too rare pleasure.

No worries on the grammar BS, your post was understandable and that is all that matters to anyone who matters.

Yes, those words are mine. You gave a situation that was unquantifiable, like someone who talks about fair without definition, so I had to quantify it to make it a discussion in reality and not hyperbola (yes I know this was in a chain talking about $1B but your meme went quite a bit farther than that). Yes, all actions are proceeded by all other actions and there were a million things that you started out with. Some of which were good and some not. Some of which were tangible and some not. An absolute reckoning would be impossible and a comparison between any two people would take ages.

Now, you bemoan a complex situation where someone gets a loan of $300k and has a support system to fall back on in emergencies. The support system isn't uncommon since about 20% of adults under 30 are currently doing that right now so I am going to ignore it. The bus ticket is trivial and if you are planning for something that costs $300k you had better be bright enough to have $500 left over to get you out of there if things go south. That leaves the loan. Depending on the type of beater you got that is putting their loan at something like 1-2 orders of magnitude in size from your gift. If given a "nice car" which, I am told, is common in upper middle class you are talking less than an order of magnitude. I do not doubt there is some advantages to that, I do doubt however that was their primary advantage. From what I have seen there are many internal qualities of character that are worth far more than that.

Of the billionaires 62% are considered "self-made" of which I will guarantee someone would quibble about each, even if they started out as a blind beggar from Birute. Looking at a few bios it looks like about 5% of current billionaires were dirt poor at the time they reached the age of majority. So, I would quibble about your "really really really good luck" comment as it is often repeated but impossible to prove or disprove as "luck" is about as squishy as "fair".

On the concept of luck I am split on it as the usage is all over the place. I believe it is mostly used as a mental crutch, so I avoid it. The random (or at least unknowable) nature of the universe seems as hard a fact as any. However, it is amazing how situations can be taken from a 99% chance of failure to a 99% chance of success (or the inverse) while people still just call it "luck". It seems more to be a call of despair than a rational argument.

Now to the tone-deaf part. I don't care and don't see how that is a bad thing. The world has tons of empathetic people who do little good with their lives flittering from one pain to another drinking their fill of misery. I think the world needs more rational people who actually try to solve problems. In this case I hope that some motivated kid reads this and decides to push a little harder instead of giving up.

As for avocado toast I would have to ask what kind of cake, I mean toast (a reference to Sherman & Peabody movie and Marie Antoinette, sorry kids made me watch it yesterday)? If you make it yourself, it's like $0.30 a meal (in season) around here and can fit most budgets. If you get it from something like starbucks its what, $12? Dear god, $12 for breakfast that is like $4k/year if done continually. Over most of the USA that is a significant chunk of change. I know it is beyond what I would be willing to spend for breakfast (under everyday circumstances).

So, if you spend a significant portion of your budget on it and can't spend it on something else you want I have little sympathy. It is like people living paycheck to paycheck. Last time I looked 50% of people making under $50k/year live paycheck to paycheck and thought they just needed $10k/year more and they would have money to save and would be wildly better off. While 40% of people making over $200k/year also live paycheck to paycheck and think they would need to make another $50k/year to really start saving. Obviously, the skill people are really good at is self-delusion.

So, nothing is a sure thing. There are all sorts of ways to torpedo yourself. Almost all situations are recoverable. In the long run perseverance and self-control look to be the defining characteristics of success. Oh, and don't take wooden nickels, or something like that.

There is a reason why its a meme... Someone with a background in advertising wants you to believe in it without having to prove it.

That is not only incorrect but also self defeating.

Imagine a system where what you said was true, intergenerational wealth should remain dead flat. Look at any sort of studies on it (in the united states) more people move between wealth quintiles than stay in the one they were born in. If it was true families should hold on to wealth for many generations. Studies on the extremely wealthy show 70% lose it in the second generation while 90% lose it by the third. Given something like 10% of those born into the lowest quintile make it to the highest quintile those numbers really do tell you that the link between the two is way overblown (not to say there is no link). Hell, anyone with a pulse should know that winning the lottery is almost a sure path to ending up broke.

As for self-defeating I would point you at numerous studies that show that convincing people they have no personal agency is one of the most effective ways to control them but oddly isn't very effective at anything else. So please agitate away knowing that you personally could convince some poor kid to give up.

Interesting idea, but by what measure?

Homeless in America have a life expectancy of about 50 years. That crushes all but the best off places historically and is pretty close to historic royalty.
https://policyadvice.net/insur...
https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/...

Their medical care even just access to an emergency room obviously is far better than anything from even very long ago. The prevalence of wars meant many monarchs died in battle. So, on safety and security their lives sort of sucked by even modern homeless standards.

The kings probably had better food (or at least more reliable) than the homeless however it doesn't take many steps off of homeless before our food (especially its safety, quality, and variety) far exceeded anything the kings could dream about.

Then you have everything else that they gain by being in proximity to such huge amounts of stuff and technology. Stuff like even basic electronics much less smartphones or cars would be beyond a King's wildest dreams.

So, yes the bottom 0.2% of the population (estimated homeless) would have too many drawbacks for a King to want to be them. However, they almost undoubtedly have some things that would be the envy of the King.

Which doesn't even touch on the real point here in that virtually everyone is so much better off in so many ways. I mean the largest cause of homelessness in the US is mental illness. Do you know the type of things they did to people with some of these conditions in the middle ages?

But.. but... My super-duper utopia has equality in the name so it just MUST be equal. Don't get me started on hierarchical, just give me dictorial power and I will get rid of all hierarchies, honest!

All jokes aside not all are more unequal than Capitalism. Some kill a bunch of people and mire the area in such squalor that even the pigs live poorly. On an absolute scale it deals with inequality by making everyone worse off.

Why would you need to cancel elections? All you really need to do is just constantly redefine what an election is until your side has to win.

Wow, I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

From both anecdotal evidence and what I can find of studies most of the prep courses only average a couple percent of score change. In fact there is some evidence that getting one of the cheep book courses and spending more time on it is actually more productive (and very cost effective). A couple years ago I actually remember a service that advertised dramatic improvement (my memory was like 500 points on the SAT). That one was proven to just be a scheme to cheat by substituting in a ringer for the kid.

I have also had a lot of motion sickness on FPS type games. Through experimentation I have found that it I can remove the bounce (some games have setting to remove the head/hand bounces while walking) then it almost always goes away.

In VR (quest) it is quite odd to me. Making walking motions during movement seems to cure the issue, except there are a couple games with no bounce in them and then I start to feel seasick. Oddly sitting down helps with that.

I don't know. Coercion and bribery are tough enough problems that I don't think we can practically solve them. Election trust and integrity are so far beyond us that it is crazy. There is always a way to cheat and the more complex the rules are the more opportunities there are.

Nope, the real sad part is that if you surveyed 100 likely voters you would probably get at least 3 answers on which party doesn't believe in democracy. Same tired sound bite from all sides.

Ya, pro choice should apply till they move out.

Well, being the original vender I suspect they have less on the line. Further, if its a Carrier that sold it to you they are probably subsidizing the price some so they are double in debt on it. Additionally, they made sure a mechanism was built in that they could blacklist the phones giving them the easy enforcement mechanism. Also, the market is 10x bigger for phones so there are more running around. Finally, phone loans are just risky my understanding is that almost half of them have been in default at one time or another.

I suspect the enforcement mechanism is the primary reason cell phones have become so ubiquitous.

Oddly enough, on some of the pre-paid plans they have recuring billing options (I know its just odd) and they are usually just a bit cheaper if you are a low usage user. I hate talking on the phone so I go that route.

According to what I can find with the Apple one, when you pay through them (really a separate company Citizens One) you are actually locked to the carrier you pick for 24 months. I suspect they put the same lock on the phone's id to enforce payment.

As for going through the carrier directly they make it so opaque that I am not sure you can tell if there is a price break.

As with Android phones... I have never gotten one direct from the carrier but I know people do that. I know Samsung does their own financing but it looks just as shady as the Apple and all the Carrier ones where they are trying to lock you into something. Usually there are all sorts of "deals" that may or may not be good buys.

Personally, I usually go with mid-price Andriod phones that are unlocked and on sale. Bought them from newegg and amazon and have never had a problem. As for service, I have only been on two carriers and that was just because I had to move from a Company plan to my own.