Life is a Grand Experiment, no?

everything after the question mark in that link just tells X twitter they went to the link from you

next time, use Xcancel

https://xcancel.com/michaeljknowles/status/1759042756536656020

My point is that inflation will drive down consumer spending for most people, but the highest incomes barely notice anything has changed.

Well, ≥$250,000 covers everything from $250,001 to $1,000,000 or 100,000,000 and beyond. The low end of that category includes people who are payed well for highly specialized and/or accredited labor, while the high end is mostly people who own things for a living.

Sure, it’s not exactly precise to lump the highest end of labor in with everything from your local car-dealership capitalist all the way the tippy top of hedge-fund owners. But it still indicates a very, very unhealthy consumer economy.

What’s that number that’s being thrown around, top 10% of incomes account for 50% of consumer spending?

…yeah, from February of this year:

https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571

https://archive.is/aKMCd

The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets.

Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.

It’s always convenient and reassuring to know one’s own ideas, alone, are untainted by scary foreigners.

One of the biggest government contractors in China is the company that conducts polling.

How do you tell the difference between an authoritarian government and a government that is responsive to public sentiment but also happens to be on diplomatically shaky ground with your own leaders?

Please tell me you are younger than the TSA

Back when this kicked off, Putin even cited a bunch of laws the UN drafted to justify the Iraq invasion.

And every single liberal should be protesting this in all the ways they’ve been saying Russian civilians ought to.

it was never going to be space travel, not this century

probably not the next one either

wow, yeah. At least pennies have the excuse of being actually useful when they were first introduced.

The article mentions that pennies almost never get pulled from circulation because they almost never get spent. New rolls of pennies get distributed, the coins are handed out as change and then… nothing. The vast majority of them never get used after that. Cant pull an old coin from circulation if it never makes its way back to a bank.

Yeesh, talk about purple prose

no, it’s $30,000,000 worth of pennies.

that seems like a lot of battery for just a keyboard