When do you consider someone "wealthy" or "rich"?

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Seattle, Aug 8, 2019.

  1. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    lol
    you say that like steve bannon sitting behind a laptop on a quiet sunday afternoon

    subtle and consistent undermining, mixed with disqualifies and blatant invalidation.
    your using attack as a defense so you do not have to state any of your own ideas.

    is that suppose to be super clever ?

    are you trying to shift the crazy stick from what you now perceive as yourself with your
    "stop locking up the bad guys" comment ?
    looking for a donkey to pin a tail on ?

    i thought this was an adults discussion not children playing school yard popularity games.

    you keep posting dissquilifiers stating i am not being serious & cant be understood , yet this is your intellectual response...
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2019
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Whatever it is, he ain't complaining. He accuses, he rants, he explicates, he fulminates and digresses and excoriates. What he does not do is complain.
     
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  5. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I see it as complaining, you see it as ranting and digressing. A difference without a distinction?
     
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  7. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Not into nuance, then? or the meaning of words? OK
     
  8. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I'm quite fond of nuance. The other day I said that those who were being responsible shouldn't be penalized and someone (Rainbow) accused me of drinking and that those responsible should be punished.

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    Of course, no one would be arguing that those responsible for some action not be held accountable. That's quite different from saying someone who acts in a personally responsible manner not be lumped in with those not acting in a personally responsible manner.

    So, yeah, I dig nuance. Rainbow isn't nuanced...rant, complain, stark raving mad, it makes little difference to the point being made.
     
  9. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447
    "selling to an audience"

    ... who is the audience ?

     
  10. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    audience = selling

    selling = government paranoia

    innovation/inoculation/jubulation
     
    RainbowSingularity likes this.
  11. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Acting in 'a personally responsible manner' - such as saving for their own old age by investing in the corporations that strip the planet and poison all who dwell on it, thus depriving thousands of other people of any old age - are voluntarily lumping themselves in with the criminals who nearly always go unpunished. If the shark must get away, at least we can eat the pilot fish.
     
  12. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    Life of the party, I presume.
     
  13. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    They make great hors d'oeuvres, deep fried in beer batter.
     
  14. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    The "crap" part is all those paragraphs in which the author essentially say nothing; however, I have no reason to dispute the relative accuracy of the reported median incomes or the approximate medians for renting/owning one can extrapolate from the data. You've also been given some data on the debt people hold from medical expenses, education, and so forth.

    What I'm not quite getting is this: do you believe that most people are really irresponsible and hold massive debt for non-essentials, or do you simply not believe that the overwhelming majority of people (in the U.S.) have little to no savings, or, worse, yet massive debts? I'm guessing that you believe the former, as the latter is (and has been) easily disproven. If so, do you have any evidence to support this notion?
     
  15. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    3,266
    There was this place in Westwood (Los Angeles), near UCLA, that made these unbelievably good battered and deep-fried potato slices--Falafel King, I think it was. Never been able to reproduce it myself, nor have I ever come across anything remotely close.
     
  16. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    A falafel place is likely vegetarian; otherwise I'd suspect they were using thin-sliced real estate speculator.
     
  17. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I have my eyes and personal experiences.

    If you have a nice house, nice cars, send kids to private schools and you have no savings then that a (bad) judgement call.

    If you live in an apartment and have a car and ever go on vacation and yet have no savings, again, it's just bad judgement.

    Debt doesn't just suddenly appear. I've known people who filed for bankruptcy that had a good job, a new car, a house that they couldn't afford and then continued to buy non-essentials on their credit cards because "they deserved it".

    I'm not arguing that there isn't a poor segment to our (any) society. We're talking about the majority or the large middle class. You seem to be arguing for no personal responsibility in these matters. People just aren't paid "enough" and debt is forced on them for "essentials".
     
  18. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Yeah! The least those irresponsible people can do is give up vacations, new clothes, reliable transportation, treats for their kids or anything beyond subsistence, and FCS stop getting sick! so that Brother Fuld can buy back his --- by now, so they'll just have to stop having dessert.

    ---- thirteen million dollar art collection
    Don't know what the forammatting program did there
     
    Last edited: Aug 11, 2019
  19. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    Incoherent as usual.

    How about saving money before you spend money. It's got nothing to do with what someone else does. You are doing it for yourself. You say people can't save. They can.
     
  20. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    What someone else did is exactly what happened to their savings.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Most people in the lower two thirds of the economy cannot reliably save much money. They can get lucky, and not have to incur debt to cover some event, but that's luck - not saving. That's like finding money in the street, or hitting a minor prize in the lottery.
    No way.

    Compare the many societies in which health care is not a mess: most of them have market economies, and all of them control medical care rigidly by governmental regulation and rule - their governments manage their medical care delivery as completely as they manage their sewer and water systems, their roads and ports, etc.

    The US system is a mess because it does not do that.

    US medical care insurance is an extortion scheme in large part* because the Republican Party of the United States insists on pretending that market forces apply, that there can be a "free" market in medical care provision.

    There can be no free or competitive market in medical care overall. There can be in some auxiliary facets of it - various devices, drugs, or innovations that a consumer can do without, take or leave according to price and quality - but that's it.

    There can be no free or competitive market in basic health care, or basic health insurance, because the requirements of such a market's existence are not met: there is no informed buyer, there is no range of differentiable sellers, there is often no way to refuse a deal, there is seldom repeat business in which acquired information can guide decisions, the benefits of good decisions do not accrue to the superior buyer, the penalties do not land on the inferior buyer, the buyer is seldom even the consumer or recipient of the service bought, and so forth.

    Health care is delivered to the young, old, sick, injured, incapable, jobless, and poor. It is paid for by the healthy, capable, jobholding, moneyed, uninjured, and working aged. And neither of these populations - neither the buyer nor the consumer - is normally capable of evaluating the purchase, or choosing differently in future repetitions of the purchasing and delivery decision.

    There is no way to set up a "free" or competitive market in these circumstances.

    * In the US, as a matter of historical fact, the 1950s and 60s efforts to include a sane and functional health care system among the other provisions of the New Deal were derailed by racism. That factor is uniquely powerful in the US, and may be the single most important reason the US - uniquely among the First World societies - has no functional national health care system.
     
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    I'll tell you about a guy I knew once.

    I worked at a county park, and for one summer I was assigned to follow Larry. Larry was not a smart man. Several years before he had been tasked with cleaning up and restocking the park restrooms, which he had trouble with. He never quite got the hang of mopping. He'd push _down_ on the mop as hard as he could, and the mop eventually broke and the broken end stabbed him in the hand.

    This should have been a warning, but they kept him on bathrooms. Shortly after that he accidentally cut off his finger attempting to change the toilet paper. No one is quite sure how, although the leading theory is that he got it stuck, panicked and just kept pulling until it broke off.

    He did not have anything biologically wrong with him. (Other than missing a finger.) Although he looked like he had Down Syndrome he had been tested and he didn't have it. I knew this because I heard all about the lawsuit that his family had waged against the park after that incident. They had to define his condition to see what part of equal-opportunity laws he fell under, and they had several doctors testify that he did not have any identifiable mental pathology. And apparently his IQ was not below 75 (the threshold for "mentally impaired.") As far as anyone could tell, he was just dumb.

    So the county settled and let him keep his job, along with paying for damages and his medical bills. I had started at the park as a laborer, but since I had my lifeguard certification and they needed guards I worked a shift as a lifeguard. At that point the maintenance division didn't want me because I was working the mornings as a guard, so as a compromise I was the Larry follower. I'd follow Larry around and make sure he didn't cut any more of his fingers off, or get stuck in a closet or something.

    I followed him around for a while with a book. I'd read while he tried to mop. Finally it got too painful for me to watch, so I'd quickly do the bathrooms while he sat sweating on a bench. Thus did I earn $3.50 an hour for an entire summer.

    This guy was living on his own; apparently he had a tiny house that his parents helped him buy that was down the street from them. I don't know if he had any savings, but since he often recounted how he had to ask his parents for money for this or that (like losing his shoes, or having his car break down again) I doubt it.

    This is not a guy who is lazy. He's not prioritizing vacations or cars or fancy clothes over savings. He simply wasn't smart enough. Managing a bank account was about the limit of his skills.

    Now you can say "but that's a rare case!" But it's not. About 12% of the country - 40 million people - have an IQ below 80. And most of those are not considered mentally defective; they are just dumb. He's applying his best judgment to the problem - it is just that, for him, his best judgment is terrible.
     
  23. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    8,849
    No, they had no savings, remember. Most people who save, still have savings. Do you dispute that?
     

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