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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Labor may be the source of your power, but consumption is how you fritter it away. Trade your labor for subscription plans, little conveniences that prop up the oligarchs, big luxuries like fancy car or home, and you lose your ability to withhold your labor in safety.

    Withholding your labor only works if you can recruit a lot of like-minded people, each with their own safe ability to withhold labor. We can get there eventually, but you have to start with yourself.


  • The right hand graph only covers, like, the last 10-15% of the left hand graph. If this was really a supply issue, then you’d expect to see a divergence starting back in the 1980s, not just the last decade.

    There’s so much spread in the ‘civil law’ countries that it’s hard to call this compelling evidence for supply-driven housing crisis. Definitely something different between the common & civil law groups, but it’s not supply. Or not just supply.








  • From @ava@piefed.blahaj.zone source, the 10%/90% ratio went from 1.55 in 1989 to 2.14 in 2025.

    Consistent with their criticism of choosing the top 10% vs the top 1-or-fewer %, the 1%/99% ratio went from 30% to 46%. The 1%/90% ratio went from 58% to 99, and the (10-1)%/90% from 97% to 114%.

    ed: Initially did this without noticing that the default view of the Fed data only showed 2010-2025. Over that range, the (10-1)% have actually lost wealth to the 1%. Over the 1989-2025 window, the (10-1)% have gained, but not nearly the pace of the 1%


  • The ‘mostly safe 4% rule’ actually includes inflation. It’s based on the assumption that assets are invested in a mix of broad stock market and treasury bonds, and allows the retireee to increase their annual spending by inflation, It usually results in the retiree dying with substantially more wealth (inflation adjusted) than they started out with. The stock market is a natural inflation hedge and, in this day of multinational conglomerates, a currency hedge.