All this thread tells me is that I am among the poor.
You’re kidding right, trying to use a global list?
Why not rich and poor are relative terms both in time and space?. A poor person in America has access to stuff that Rockefeller couldn’t imagine in 1900. And I rather be a poor person in America than the 3rd wive of Saudi Prince.
This topic is about taxes in the United States. If you want to tell everyone how rich they are because somewhere out there someone lives on a bowl of rice a day, perhaps you should start a different topic. This ploy of rich people trying to remind poor people how “rich” they are is just ridiculous and is unfortunate to see here.
“Well, you’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake”
Also, having traveled to those places where people live on a few dollars a day… the purchasing power disparity makes a huge impact. In India I could easily eat out every meal, every day, for less than $5. If really pressed you could do $2 and not be too inconvenienced. Rent in one of the major metropolitan areas? The equivalent of $100. So the fact that I get paid 10x what my Indian colleagues of the same level do is pretty much offset completely by the relative costs. With some exceptions (things like phones, consoles, and computers cost the same, so are relatively much more expensive for them).
Which is t to say we aren’t better off than many other countries, just that comparing pure incomes is a fools errand without some correction for costs built in. Because unless my colleagues travel to the US, or into India, I’m not 10x better off than them*.
*huge asterisk here for the many, and varied, differences in things like infrastructure, type of housing available (no such equivalent to my suburban house with yard), and myriad of other factors that make comparisons even with corrections facile
I completely agree with your assessment that Strollen is a fool for trying to use that dumbass argument.
Geez lighten up. I wasn’t making a serious argument. I know nothing about @DaveLong financial situation if he was offended by my flippant comparison than I apologize.
I stand by my view that is tax reform, isn’t the apocalyptic event that it is being portrayed by the Democrats or P&R. There are lots of shitty elements to which I have criticised as well as some good elements.
I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to point out that a lot of criticism of the bill is because it hurts a subset of folks in the top 10% of the country. This group is over-represented in the forum The point I was trying to make with Dave is just because you don’t make $100,000 or $150,000 a year you aren’t poor.
Yes, of course making $20K in India is helluva of a lot different than making $20K in California, and it is been so long since made $20K, I really have no idea what means to live $20K anymore.
The main criticism of the bill is that they’re cutting important programs and budgets in order to do this cash grab for the rich. They’re fucking over our kids for what?
Nothing is all good, or all bad. @Strollen is right that some parts of the tax changes do make sense, but they are far outweighed by the bad. Most notably, the huge disparity in large reductions for those with investment in corporations and high end incomes (largely the same people) vs smaller reductions for everyone else, and the massive deficit that we’ll see due to those tax reductions.
It would be great if we got a Congress and President who would look at the situation and keep the good changes while modifying the rest. Don’t hold your breath, no matter which party is in power.
This is ridiculous. None of what you are saying changes the fact this bill heavily, heavily helps the top 1% in this country at the expensive of everyone else.
Then maybe you should stop trying to speak for them.
And you have no idea about the income distributions on this board, nor do you know what is over-represented here.
Actually, I have a pretty good idea about the demographics of the site, I’ve been member for a very long time.
There are lots of source of data (of admitted less than perfect accuracy) on websites demographics.
https://www.quantcast.com/quartertothree.com#trafficCard
Even if the over $150K number is off by a factor of 2 that’s still way higher than the national average.
Now @tomchick wants to say these numbers are way off then, I’ll stand corrected.
But honestly, you don’t need to do any more than hang out on the forums like both of us have done for years to figure out a few things.
There are lot of seriously smart people, a high percentage of them have graduate degrees, many folks have jobs in STEM fields, and the bulk of the forum members are Gen X. older millennials, or baby boomers. Anyone of these factors is going to push the income of the forum above the average combine, them all and you get result similar to what we see from quantcast, where the median income is well over $100K.
How accurate do you think these metrics actually are? I’m curious, because this looks…unexpected.
The secret is out…QT3 is composed of lootbox farmers.
It’s probably picking up on the high concentration of Furries that frequent this board :D
Oh. Furries. Nevermind.
How do they extrapolate income from mostly anonymous people visiting this web forum?
The same way any web tracker does. Things like cookies, search history, and in the case of the forum I’m sure some measure of keyword analysis. The prevalence and type of topics about tech, hardware, and such certainly set some pretty firm minimums on the average, that’s for sure.
Yup, the reason that Google sells more ads than all the newspapers and will soon eclipse TV,is they can tell advertiser exactly who sees their ads. Plus at some point most of us whip out our credit cards and buy stuff
which allows even more data to be collected.
“You have zero privacy [on the internet[, get over it”, Scott McNeally SUN CEO circa 1998.