Yes. Again, this is the norm for the middle class.

Both my cars have no airbags. Cars with airbags are more expensive. I could afford one car with airbags in place of two without, but I'd be instantly fucked if it broke down. I'd also have more to lose with a barebones insurance policy on a more valuable car (or a more expensive policy). So I zerg-rush the transportation problem with multiple cheap cars with barebones insurance.

You can't buy a *new* car with no airbags, but buying a new car is usually not a smart decision on a modern middle-class budget.

Yeah, BTDT, so bring back the gladiators and make sure there's bread. I know legal pot's coming but the gladiators are a classic.

Maybe it's a cycle, but my dad was born into the start of it, and there's no sign I'll live to see the end of it. Therefore, the cyclic or non-cyclic nature of it is an academic issue to me. It's a problem right now.

Oh here it is, another favorite of the I-can't-believe-people-mow-their-own-lawns set. If they're not as rich as me, it's because they're not as smart. If they'd just retrain for a new career, the right career, with perfect timing, they could be rich too! No different than rearranging a stock portfolio!

Apparently we're all "making the wrong choices" on a massive scale, especially Gen. Y'ers. Guess we're just a buncha idiots.

I'm pretty sure you're not in a position to know, so let me tell you that yes, things are absolutely worse. Smartphones, airbags, slightly larger houses, awesome new health care technologies many of us can't afford...even the Internet, don't quite make up for this ruin. A whole generation is massively un(der)employed now, that's how bad it is.

Don't take my word for it though, I encourage you to seek more opinions on it from people who don't "have a gardener."

The industrial revolution was clearly a good thing in the long term, but it had terrible short term effects - and whole generations of people lived and died in that miserable "short term," and that may be what's happening again. To me a system that's simply too slow to respond to generations of poverty is not a good one.

Sure we all have decent access to food and water, but beyond that? Not really. People need shelter, transportation, and communications to participate in the economy, and if they're really unlucky, health care beyond routine examination. People have trouble affording all of these, and the rich shouldn't get a free pass to sit on their asses and afford all of these plus all the "status markers" they want just because we're not starving to death in the streets en masse.

The rest of us have to work bloody hard - harder over time, as you admit - to just afford to continue participating in the economy, and in the process we fund the want-less lives of leisure of the rich. To me this does not seem like an ethical system.

Who will pay for the robots to make those things in the first place if nobody can afford them? We have the technical means to improve people's lives through automation right now, but we don't do it because it doesn't make economic sense. I don't see how this will change, especially if we assume, as you argue, that technology does not get cheaper over time.

That might explain a sudden one-time regression in the trend, but not a long-term reversal. It's been half a century already and salaries are apparently still reeling from women entering the workforce.

If this is permanent, then that crazy economist who wanted to increase the earth's population to grow the economy was as wrong from an economic standpoint as he was from an environmental standpoint.

On the other hand, the automation that the Luddites fought against caused the better part of a century's worth of economic hardship, but it did eventually recover, so maybe it is just a dip long enough to last generations-worth of working lives.

I'm not sure I buy the argument about inflation being a neighbor-relative value, but I'll assume you're correct about it for a moment. So why did having the same standard of living as your neighbors suddenly start requiring more work to achieve over time around the '70s? For many decades before that, the trend was the opposite.

We're not nomads or sparse frontiersmen, this is a heavily populated planet with huge, expensive, established population centers. It's not just a matter of outrunning floods and forest fires. Drought leads to famine leads to conflict, displacement leads to conflict, disasters are generally considered to be bad. We've seen it all before and we'll soon see lots more.

If you stick to a basic login only with no secondary authentication options, this doesn't happen, you just get logged in and you'll get a security notification the next time you log in from your usual location - I have a very old gmail account though, I don't know if it's still possible to set up a gmail account to work this way.

Can this theoretical person afford a house on top of all that? To support a family? Just how much is he making? Is he like your everyday maid-hiring, professional-landscaping, opportunity-and-wonder-rich guy whose only real problem is envy? Because the WSJ once had an article about that guy and he (she, actually - single mom) was pulling a cool quarter-million per year. Today's middle-class people absolutely couldn't afford all that on a single income, and in the '60s they could.

I don't know how to make it simpler, the numbers say today's income is worth much less, inflation-adjusted. You must prove how the value of it is somehow more, in spite of this fact.

You still seem to be arguing that today's everyday technology is more valuable today than '60s everyday technology was in the '60s, is that correct? If so, why did technology abruptly stop getting cheaper around the 1970s?

I'm open to discussing what effects the various discriminatory practices of the '60s had on the economic differences, but that's not a point of my argument. I'd be happy to assume those discriminatory practices caused widespread economic damage for the sake of this discussion, if you'd like. Life straight-up wasn't better overall for everyone in the '60s, I'm not saying that it was - I'm saying people didn't have to work nearly as much for the same compensation.

The median of the higher income in a family today will not buy what it would in the 60s, unless you fall back on your "New technology takes way more resources now than it did then" argument which I addressed in my last post (and you did not respond to). That income certainly can't support a household single-handedly anymore as it could back then.

If you'd like to argue that clean air ate up all the money that most of us don't have I'd entertain that as well. Maybe the climate denialists are right about the costs of addressing climate change being catastrophic, if buying clean air cost us half our incomes.

BTW if you think a middle class family today has a maid and a gardener, that suggests you're out of touch with reality again. I know a lot of middle-class people in the US and they consider a maid to be a "rich people thing," and most do their own gardening - some talk about hiring illegal immigrants for yardwork. I have some upper-middle class relatives with a house in the US and a maid isn't worth it to them.

Wow, you must be fabulously rich to be this out-of-touch with reality. The "envy" and "expectations/standards" arguments are standard tropes from the I-can't-see-your-problems-from-up-here crowd too. And of course none of them mesh with the cold hard math of the situation.

Your argument that slightly fancier cars and houses and a set of gadgets makes up for having to work more for less of these fancier things, suggests that technology does not become cheaper over time. That it would cost somewhat more in resources to make a basic car from the present than one in 1960. Your argument basically confirms the stagnation but measures it in goods and services rather than dollars on a paycheck. Before the point of stagnation, people didn't have to work more to get better things. They worked the same or less and were somehow able to afford better things as if by magic.

What the hell was happening between busting your ass on the homestead in the early 1800s to supporting a family nicely on one income in the '60s? Why does it take two high-end incomes to afford the same things today, just because the (much smaller and less decadent) car has a few more safety features, the (maybe slightly bigger, likely on less land) house has cat6 in the walls instead of asbestos in the roof, and there are a couple grand of gadgets in the house? It doesn't add up.

Unfortunately reality nearly isn't as simple as a kids' RPG, there are many more variables that affect crop growth, and that's before you get into crop placement.

I managed to read your post although I speedily skipped through the latter half.

So you're saying that because crops grow well in rainforests, and rainforests are warmer than Canadian tundra, that global warming should be good for crops right?

Well did you balance the amount of tundra-to-rainforest conversion against the rainforest-to-desert conversion? YOU DIDN'T!? 8-O

Spoilers: It will tell us that the rich have all-consuming, all-important needs and the rest of us merely have trifling wants. Act surprised.

If some light is being turned into electricity and then heat on the surface instead of being reflected into space, that adds heat to the atmosphere doesn't it?

"NOOOO those were supposed to be private! Only for access to authorized Bugzilla users and those with the technical means to steal the information!!! Our precious cyberweapons, RUINED!!! T_T " - NSA