Financial slavery. Slavery is a spectrum, not a binary condition. We’re slaves and everything we think we own is owned by banks and billionaires. We’re still pawns in a game of Kings.
I also doubt that half of the 50% that say they’re on a path to financial independence are actually on that path. There’s no way that many people have enough cash or assets to retire with the current wealth inequality.
Financial independence isn’t necessarily never work again. Though some definitions include that.
Even still, the article is talking about financial freedom, which even they recognize as a sliding scale
Half of Americans describe “financial freedom” as being comfortable, but not necessarily rich, and 49.3% say it refers to meeting financial obligations and having some money left over each month. About 54.2% define it as living debt-free, and 46.2% believe it means never having to worry about money.
I would be more in the latter part of saying it’s living mostly debt free. Or more depreciating debt free. Aka not house poor and able to manage finances.
Unfortunately the US (at least, I can’t speak to other parts but it seems Europe can be grouped in here too) has abysmal financial education. So many people by into consumerism at such a deep level that they impoverish themselves in it. I’m not totally free of unnessecary spending, but I don’t buy into so badly it puts me in a bad place or in debt.
We have debt. Mainly in our house but we still live below our means and always have. Places that loan you money aren’t looking out for you. And Society looks down on people that set boundaries or take the time to understand the full scope of a contract (such as a mortgage. I have seen it first hand).
Better education and better cultural norms that didn’t prioritize “things” and consumerism would go a long way. And that starts with parents, not schools or teacher. It’s a parents job. We have a lot of lazy parents and it’s now a generational issue.
Availability of credit wasn’t nearly as widespread in even the 80s but now we have a generation of people living in credit debt that haven’t taken the time to teach their kids either. Heck I’m partially at fault too (though my kids aren’t really of age to understand money quite yet)
Better education and better cultural norms that didn’t prioritize “things” and consumerism would go a long way.
So on the one hand I agree with you. On the other hand, consumer spending is 70% of U.S. GDP. If consumer spending takes a hit, we’re all going to feel it.
If this sounds awful it’s because it is. Our economy is not designed to benefit all, or even most.
Inflation of course has made it worse. But when covid hit and the government started just handing out money and suspending loan payments it became a real problem. Many of those people with the loans took that money and continued spending and acting like the loans were just going away.
Even if the US just wiped all outstanding consumer debt off the table, it’s not going to fix the issue. Because it’s cultural and behavioral. And frankly it’s worrying in that I don’t really see a fiscal or policy that can make it better. People won’t chnage and it means we are heading for more pain (financially).
Even anecdotally it’s shocking to me when people ask how we paid for xyz emergencies but still get into 1000 dollar a month car loans or buy iPhones on credit.
It seems silly but it’s happened most of my adult life. And it’s never not been shocking.
Black people also are not totally blameless when it comes to slavery. Liberals don’t like to talk about it, but Africans sold their enemies to white slave traders. Also, literal slavery still exists in Africa. In fact, most of the metal in our phones was mined by slaves. Most of the chocolate we eat was grown and harvested by slaves. Much of the coffee we drink is grown and harvested by slaves. Sugar too.”
Frederick Douglass, arguing for unity among black and white laborers in 1883, said that “experience teaches us that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.”
Oh shit well I sure hope people organize in the 19th century and stop the things that were actual oppression.
Douglass was still supporting what I’m saying tho, which is that calling yourself a slave because you have a job is incorrect. Also Douglass would shit his pants if a wealthy white landowner complained about being “in slavery.”
It’s…a direct quote. I’m not sure how shittalking me is providing any worth to the conversation. Please make one statement supporting your position with information rather than criticism.
There are many different kinds of slavery, chattel slavery is one of many. Indentured servitude was a much less extreme and dehumanizing form of slavery, serfdom was something in between. Slavery is an incredibly broad term that basically means someone is unable to choose their labor, as it belongs to someone else. That doesn’t necessarily mean the person does, like in chattel slavery, just that their work does.
Gross, a grown man raping a 12 year old is unquestionably evil. Someone like that just needs to be kept out of society. Just throw him on an island with all the other criminals and let them fend for themselves.
And people have the goddamn gall to argue when I state that our society, and the justice system in particular, heavily favor women. Any guy that did this exact same crime would have gotten 2x the sentence.
Earlier this very week there was that other wacko girl that killed her boyfriend and a friend when she intentionally slammed her SUV into a house at 100 MPH. She murdered 2 people and only got about 15 years in prison.
You might want to edit that again. The rapist Brock Allen Turner goes by just his middle name now. The rapist Allen Turner has been seen partying in Ohio bars and clubs recently. Stay safe ladies of Ohio.
Have you ever heard of Brock Turner, or maybe Johnny Depp? Good luck getting any women to go near you though.
Besides, these sentences are insane in general and modern first world societies (meaning not the US) do not focus on punishing people like we do. They focus on rehabilitation because it’s a service to society, because they actually give a shit about their societies. So the fact that anyone can think that fifteen years of being locked in a cage getting angrier and angrier with no psych help and shit for healthcare “isn’t enough,” really says something about the people who endorse that.
Not to question msnbc or anything, but these stats seem like utter bullshit. Only 10% of offerings are remote? They must be including fast food and manufacturing jobs in their data, because when I look at LinkedIn it’s like 70%.
Unfortunately for LinkedIn I found out a lot are fake and they dont actually hire you remote, and they tell you straight up at the first interview… They’re basically doing it as SEO and wasting everybody’s time
Earnest young Republican activist: “So a lot of my classmates at college say the Republican party doesn’t care about climate change, I know that’s a lot of fake news, but could you tell them that you’re taking this issue seriously?”
DeSantis: “This is a woke media trap! Fox news is part of the woke media!”
[Unintelligible yelling]
Ramaswamy: “Environmental regulations are smothering our economy like a wet blanket, which incidentally is also what I’m secretly hoping increased humidity in the global climate does to all you fucking rubes in the next 20 years while I chill out in my bunker and totally don’t get backstabbed by my body guards.”
[More unintelligible yelling]
Christie: “Vivek Ramaswamy is brown and has a funny last name, just like Barack Obama!”
[Even more unintelligible yelling]
[Unclear]: “You’re being paid off!” [Different voice, still unclear who]: “No you’re being paid off!”
Earnest young Republican activist [internally, off camera]: “♪ Hello darkness my old friend ♪”
To be fair, Christie’s done a great job of antagonizing the other candidates when they say or do stupid shit. I wouldn’t vote for him either, but I appreciate that he’s dragging the rest of the field down with him
He is shit. But he has a really quick wit and is quick to pounce on any candidate who does not have their shit together. He essentially killed Rubio’s campaign in 2016.
So I do still believe Christie was doing a racism there and should be called out for it (like, anybody who talks about their last name is Barack Obama now? Just taking that piece of rhetoric off the table puts non-white and second generation immigrant candidates at a big disadvantage), but I just discovered that one of the extra psychopathic Republican lawmakers apparently made this same argument last night and now I feel dirty, so I’m just gonna say fuck everyone on that debate stage, edit in a joke a Ramaswamy’s expense to make it more clear that I think he’s a piece of shit too and call it a day
Dog I’ve been lying flat since I figured out the world wasn’t how I imagined it. I’m so stuck in my lack of freedom I’m like not even in the top 10 decision makers in my own life.
What is actually the definition of “financial freedom”? Having (earned / gained) enough money, so that a person has no need to go to work anymore? If that’s the case, I would expect that number to be much, much lower than 50%.
EDIT: sorry, I just read it in the article. If “financial freedom” just means to work and live more or less without having to worry about financial obligations and what will happen tomorrow, then less than 50% is a rather shocking figure.
Agree. And anyone could quickly go one from side to the other. In need of a expensive surgery? Might lose your financial freedom. Bought an expensive house and lost your job? Goodbye as well.
Health insurance sucks. I’m all for universal health coverage with the opportunity to pay more for faster service for those who are well off.
Just think - there are tens of thousands of insurance employees who’s job is to calculate risk and develop pricing algorithms such that the company makes money no matter what. There’s no product or value created for humanity. It’s just ensuring that some people who own significant portions of the business keep getting paid.
They screw doctors and patients. Doctors get reimbursed whatever arbitrary predefined rates that were agreed upon during contract negotiations. That’s if insurance gives the green light for the patient to even get the procedure. Why does a middleman decide who gets medical care and how much the doctors should be paid? How is a patient supposed to choose a surgery team that’s all in network?
I get what you’re saying, but fuck insurance. These companies are a parasite on healthcare, housing, and mobility.
Well, yes and no. It should probably be a state-run system or at least a heavily regulated system where the companies are limited in their profit making. No idea how an ideal system could look like. Here in Germany there is a two-fold system, which a generic public health insurance (with several companies offering those insurance services), where every employee pays a certain percentage of his salaries as insurance fee (actually the total fee is split 50/50 between employer and employee). Service is rather basic, but sufficient.
And then there is the possibility to get a private health insurance contract, if your income is above a certain level, which interestingly is (for the most time) lower than that in the general public insurance, but service is much better (e.g. you usually get doctor appointments much faster if you are a “private patient”). The only downside is that you don’t know how much you will have to pay when you get old, and once you are out of the public insurance you can not go back (only if you income falls below the private insurance entry level, which is rather unlikely).
It’s not ideal but it works for the most part and with some exceptions (like new teeth, where you have to pay a substantial part by yourself) you don’t have to be afraid of any health problems, operations or whatever, because that’s all covered. Those insurance companies are treated like public service companies and prices for medication and medical (doctor) services are subject to agreement between the government and the medical associations representing doctors, hospitals etc., but I guess those companies still make profits and the doctors have good earnings.
I get your point, but even with a certain level of protection you’re probably still better off than with no protection at all. However, the system should also not be based on profits and shareholder value, that’s true.
Asked to raise their hand if they thought mankind was to blame, not one went up. And only one candidate said climate change was real in the short discussion that followed.
For fuck’s sake, have they been outside recently? Like at all?
Right? “it’s the hottest its ever been” is the refrain of this summer. Pretty sure it will be the coolest summer in recent memory soon enough.
We are fucked. We got fucked by our politicians 30 years ago, the fuckers today are fucking the Zoomer’s grandchildren. If any can afford to have kids.
Actually 127 years ago. Svante Arrhenius published a paper indicating that creating so much CO2 could potentially alter the Earth’s surface temperature to such a degree that it may affect life.
That was in 1896 about 130 years after the start of the industrial revolution. So by that point we had a pretty significant amount of CO2 in the air already.
Human beings have been dumping CO2 into the atmosphere hard for the last quarter of a millennia. I usually bring this up because people need to understand, even if we stop today 100%, we’ve got at least five centuries of a problem on our hands. Because it’s going to take at least twice as long to clean things up as it did making the mess.
And that should help people understand how difficult a problem we have because we need a solution that can work for us for 500 years at least. I mean we’re doing nothing right now which is just making the problem worse, but solutions aren’t ever going to be a one and done thing. Just swapping over to solar or just driving EVs aren’t going to cut it. It’s a good start but we must reinvent all of human society on this planet for the next half millennia to actually solve the problem. That is the actual task that lies before humanity. There has never been a more complex challenge put before mankind ever in the history of all existence for Homo Sapiens.
Disagree. They said we could not possibly sustain the growth of human civilization due to how much food we could produce, but then we had the industrial revolution and we could make more food. That was not imaginable before, but it’s life now.
Of course, that leads to where we are. We now have to invent a way to use green energy to essentially make carbon dense something and put it back into the ground. It’s a monumental task, sure, but I have a feeling humanity could figure it out quickly if we would just TAKE THE DAMN ISSUE SERIOUSLY.
I mean really. We made a vaccine in record time when the whole world was scared of something. Let’s get scared again and all work together on this.
Don’t worry, we can count on some conservative “expert” spouting about how if we do effective atmospheric carbon capture that we will kill all the plants and end the world. I know because I have already had people try to make that argument with me. It was all I could do not to solve a single source of carbon emissions in that moment. So dumb.
I just meant that the carbon from ~30 years ago is what is affecting us today. Like others have said we have been theorizing that carbon can cause climate change since a bit into the industrial revolution. Not sure when we “knew” it was real though.
As long as they can go from their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned offices, to their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned limos, to their taxpayer-funded air-conditioned mansions, they’re good.
Jokes on you, I’m not literally on fire at this exact moment, which proves conclusively that climate change is a leftist plot, and that the south will rise again!
I hear you, but I think it’s important to distinguish between climate and weather. Especially if we actually want to make a credible argument for climate action and help people understand the situation.
The heat waves we’re seeing right now are horrible and a result of inaction over long periods of time. They will also contribute to the overall climate change discussion, but it is weather. The current weather will show up in the climate data as we move forward, but let’s make sure we use the correct terminology.
I have some dumbass on IG thinking there is no climate change and the only reason the data says there is is because they measure at airports where there are a lot of tarmacs. It’s such a dumb argument that I have no idea how to respond.
I guess they’re doing all those antarctic sea ice readings at airports, and that the water temperatures off the coast of Florida were actually taken at airports, and all of Texas must be one large airport.
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