TFYS (u/TFYS) - Readit News

TFYS commented on Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people apnorc.org/projects/food-... · Posted by u/speckx

WalterBright · 18 days ago

> not everyone can be an owner

Anyone with $10 and a phone can be an owner of the means of production (by buying stock).

> It's meaningless to say

The meaning is the massive improvement in the standard of living due to free markets.

BTW, if being "poor" means being in the bottom quintile of income, there will always be "poor" people, regardless of how well they live.

TFYS · 18 days ago

That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way.

Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.

TFYS commented on Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people apnorc.org/projects/food-... · Posted by u/speckx

WalterBright · 18 days ago

> Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy.

History says otherwise. The mass immigration to the US in the 1800s was all poor people arriving with nothing but a suitcase. They moved up into the middle class and beyond en masse.

Middle class people live better than medieval kings.

TFYS · 18 days ago

That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other people in the society they currently live in have a million times more, they are not wealthy.

I'm sure you understand how capitalism works. If you do, you should understand that not everyone can be an owner, someone has to do the actual work.

TFYS commented on Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people apnorc.org/projects/food-... · Posted by u/speckx

gruez · 19 days ago

>And it really is as simple as that.

It really isn't, because your "simple" comparison is bunk. For one, it's measuring stock vs flow. Stock prices measure stock, eg. the size of a piggy bank. Salaries measure flow, eg. your annual salary. Directly comparing the two results is meaningless. It's easy to demonstrate this with the piggy bank example. If your salary was 50k/year, you saved 5k/year, then your piggy bank would be growing much faster than your salary growth, but it doesn't say much about the economy, or whether you could quit your job or not. In fact, if you started with $0 in savings, your piggy bank growth would be infinite, which really shows how absurd stock vs flow comparisons can be.

Moreover stock prices incorporate a variety of factors that are irrelevant to wealth distribution. Low interest rates makes stocks more valuable by reducing the future discount rate, and corporate consolidation makes stock indices go up, but neither of those factors directly affect inequality. For instance, a simple DCF model would value a company with earnings of of $1/share/year at $16.67/share if the risk free rate was 6%, but $33.33/share if interest rates were at 3%. However it's unclear whether such drop in interest rates would double inequality, as a direct comparison would imply. After all, most people hold on to debt (eg. mortgages) as well savings.

TFYS · 19 days ago

Isn't the point still valid if you consider just the return on capital? If the market cap of the S&P500 was about 18 trillion in 2015 and returns 10%, the income going to to the owners of that capital is 1.8 trillion. In 2025 the market cap is 53 trillion, and a 10% return is then 5.3 trillion. That's an increase of almost 300%.

Now if the average salary was 48,000 in 2015 and there were 150 million people employed in the us, that's 7.2 trillion. The 2025 average is about 66,000 with 160 million employed. That's about 10 trillion. Around 40% increase in income going to labor. Am I missing something?

TFYS commented on What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like? whatdoesonebilliondollars... · Posted by u/alexrustic

harmmonica · 22 days ago

I always thought one of the biggest problems with modern education is not spending enough time teaching people about interest rates/return on investment. If everyone just understood what you're pointing out here--just really "got it"--I feel like the world would be in a much better place. It's not dire (I don't think?), and I know we've come a very long way, but, man, it could be so much better.

TFYS · 22 days ago

Where does this return on investment come from? From people working. It's not possible for everyone to live on investments, someone has to do the actual work. Imagine if everyone started investing most of their money now, and after a generation or two everyone had enough capital to live on the interest alone. Who would do the work? I think we would benefit more from letting a larger part of the returns that work creates go to the people who do the work, not to the people that happen to have a lot of capital.

TFYS commented on “No tax on tips” is an industry plant newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee

JasonBorne · a month ago

There is definitely a huge difference in countries where they tip and countries where they don't tip.

TFYS · a month ago

Coming from a country with no tipping at all, it was somewhat creepy how the people expecting tips acted when I visited the US for the first time. You can tell when friendliness is fake/forced, and living in a country without tipping you don't see it nearly as much. I felt a bit uncomfortable.

TFYS commented on The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong derekthompson.org/p/the-a... · Posted by u/rbanffy

999900000999 · a month ago

Excessive regulation is 90% of it.

Here's how a rational market works. If I build an apartment complex, eventually those apartments will get older and more affordable. And even before that upper middle class folks will move in, freeing up their previous homes.

But that's not how many in local governments see it. So you have affordable housing quotas on new developments.

You have developers building units for the homeless at 600k each. https://abc7news.com/post/new-high-rise-building-house-skid-...

Affordable housing vouchers, section 8, etc, become a dystopian nightmare.

11 year waiting list. https://laist.com/news/section-8-waiting-list

The problem is twofold, first it's too difficult to build homes. In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction.

Parking requirements ensure space that could be occupied by people is instead reserved for vehicles. Plus the parking structure itself drives up the cost to build, 30% of your construction cost isn't unreasonable.

On a macro level, many cities should of fixed their issues with inadequate housing construction decades ago.

On a personal level, you need to go where you can afford.

After about 4 generations of living in LA about half my family has left. It's more than possible to make it off a middle class salary, but you need to make that choice.

If you stay in an unaffordable city you can't wait around waiting for politicians to fix it.

TFYS · a month ago

> Here's how a rational market works.

Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.

TFYS commented on British man claims he's unable to watch porn as tattoos confuse age check system needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/... · Posted by u/heavyset_go

general1726 · a month ago

What is a benefit of a video game? People can get addicted on gaming, let's ban it. What is a benefit a of a good steak? It is not healthy, let's ban it.

You don't like stuff other people enjoy and then you will go out of your way with ludicrous excuses to destroy it for others. Like a religious bigot.

TFYS · a month ago

Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (except in very limited areas) because the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.

TFYS commented on British man claims he's unable to watch porn as tattoos confuse age check system needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/... · Posted by u/heavyset_go

general1726 · a month ago

Kid can also cut itself with a knife, let's ban knives, even if it saves one child from getting cut...

Maybe problem is not a knife. Maybe problem are parents who are expecting that state will baby sit their children.

TFYS · a month ago

Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn.

Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to get addicted to it, and there's a lot of bad things happening on the supply side of it. I'm sure porn has also changed how people behave and what people expect in relationships, but it's hard to study such things. The amount of sex we have has decreased recently. I don't know if it's due to porn, but it'd be worth studying. If sexual satisfaction is easily available, there's less reason to seek the real thing.

It's beyond parents to fix these things, at best they can delay the discovery of porn for a few years, but that doesn't fix anything.