The mini recession continues

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a reply to: interupt42

obviously thats true but also our system is incredibly out of balance... it's bad and it's getting worse

originally posted by: JAGStorm

originally posted by: lakenheath24
I see you did not mention the student debt and the 80k of debt for a women's studies degree which is worth what on the market? Bad BAD guidance counseling and propaganda that you need a degree.

I agree that educational costs are out of control, and that some people should go the trade route.
There is also the fact that many students are very irresponsible with their student loans.

I had a friend that had six figure student loan debt. She graduated and got a job for $11 hr in her profession!
A lot of it was her fault, she was basically living like a rock star on those loans! I would be curious to see how much "student debt" is actually from education related cost vs. irresponsible spending.

Six figures could be anything from $100,000 to $999,999. The tuition fees are between $5,000 and $50,000. Costs for food and living are normally between $8,000 and $12,000 dollars per year. Assume a three year course, and the minimum would be $40,000. Maximum would be $186,000

The majority of living costs are rent. That can be anything from $200/month for renting a room in a house to $3000/month for renting your own house.

originally posted by: lakenheath24
As far as data, I have done a couple threads on student debt myself on here, but a google search show ups thousands of articles of how tuition has blown up in relation to this notion that everone should have a degree to suceed. Education is the 2008 housing market....tich, tick, tick.

It's a competitive world. A bachelors used to be enough. Everyone has those now, so you need two bachelors or a masters. Give it another 20 years and everyone will have that and you will need even more.

Welcome to capitalism.

a reply to: Aazadan

pretty soon you won't even be able to work until your 40 because you have to spend 100 years in college and 100 years working in low pay intern positions to prove your worth

basically low skill until your 30-40 years old then we let you make enough money to barely survive on

originally posted by: Fools
a reply to: toysforadults

I agree with your wage to inflation and I would also say it is worse than that. The reason is that the US govt decided some years ago to not include certain items in its inflation equations. I think food was the funniest one to leave out. I need to make sure I am right about that though as my memory isn't the best at times. But I am pretty sure I read that.

We don't actually know what they include. CPI's basket of goods is a secret formula, and is highly prone to manipulation. While we don't know exactly how it's been tinkered with over time, we do know that it has been modified from time to time to produce whatever results the government wants, rather than to reflect reality.

originally posted by: toysforadults
a reply to: interupt42

obviously thats true but also our system is incredibly out of balance... it's bad and it's getting worse

Yep, however im sure changing back from repubs back to dems and vice versa will fix it.

Its getting worse because people arent focused on the one real issue. The MSM, the gop and dnc has evryone fighting over bs manufactured symptoms such as healthcjare,economy, minimum wage,racism,sexism, immigration,taxes,etc,

The only thing people should allow their party to talk about is minimizing conflict of interest between govt officials and Lobbyists. As long as we continue to allow people with conflict of interest to make our laws things will only continue to worsen.

a reply to: interupt42

actually this thing we are experiencing are why 3rd world countries are in the shape they are in

good ol boys club, in favors, nepotism, corruption runs rampant the standard business environment collapses and soon the society itself collapses

that's where we are headed, we are headed for a 3rd world collapsed country, but don't worry... work hard

originally posted by: terrapincb
One problem I see with that is the buying power of the dollar figure given in today's dollars compared to 1996. If I took those figures and just put Jan 1996 and Jan 2016 in the BLS CPI Inflation calculator, one can see that $54K in 1996 dollars requires $83K for the same buying power.


www.bls.gov...

$54,105.00 in Jan 1996 = $83,020.34 in Jan 2016 dollars.

So the income sure hasn't risen with inflation, so ultimately we are making less money even if we are paid a little more now?

The problem with this, is that the official inflation rate doesn't actually reflect purchasing power. The easiest example of this is minimum wage. In 1967 it was possible on minimum wage to own a home, pay for college out of pocket, have a car, and have plenty of food, and still have a small amount left over. Today, you can take 100% of your income on minimum wage and it won't even cover a house payment. In fact, if you can save 30% of your income on minimum wage, at $350 per credit hour (a fairly typical state schoold tuition rate), it would take you 18,792 hours of work (or 9 years full time) to pay for college out of pocket. And that's already at a pretty absurd savings rate.

If you're interested in measuring this. Stop measuring in dollars from year to year. Start measuring in what jobs pay and what things cost at various times. Then figure out how many hours or minutes of work it cost at whatever job you're using to purchase said item. One of the most interesting long term records of this is the Big Mac index, which started as a joke but has been surprisingly accurate.

originally posted by: BeefNoMeat
I’m with you, I find it hard to believe Americans spend less of their disposable income on entertainment; Americans spend a good deal less of their disposable income on transportation fuel than in the ‘70s, but yet, there is an entry for “transportation” asserting that Americans spend about the same...be nice to see the underlying data and understand the assumptions and methodology employed to compute the charted numbers/figures.

The price of cars have gone up. The average price of a new car is now higher than the average income. In the 70's cars were most often offered as a 48 month loan. These days they are 96 months, because purchasing power has declined, and as such the monthly payment of the car needed to go down. The same thing happened to homes. They were 10 year loans at one point, then 15, then 30. In some states home loans are now 50 years, and in others things are so bad that home loans have become interest only loans, where there is never any intention to pay down any part of the principle.

a reply to: Aazadan

thanks, if I wasn't working and going to school full time (both) I would get more in depth but I appreciate you actually sharing to knowledge here

originally posted by: toysforadults
pretty soon you won't even be able to work until your 40 because you have to spend 100 years in college and 100 years working in low pay intern positions to prove your worth

Probably. I don't see a problem with that though. At one point we stopped schooling people at 12 years old and had them goto work instead. Eventually we started educating them a bit longer, they went to school for 12 years rather than 6, and they became more productive. We're now transitioning to schooling them for 18ish years. And they'll become even more productive.

Efficiency gains from education are exponential, the more you know, the more you can connect new ideas to already existing ideas and derive something of value that justifies the time spent learning that material. To put this another way, look at the difference between an 8th grader and a 12th grader. Now look at the difference between a high school senior and a college senior. Now look at the difference between that college senior and someone who has finished a Masters. That's gaps of 4, 4, and 2. Thus, if we take that idea of exponential gains from education and extrapolate it... we should in theory be able to reach a point where a lifetime of education and a moment of work is more productive than an entire lifetime of work is now.

The question is, how to fund that.

a reply to: Aazadan

I don't think we've gained any efficiency from education I think it comes from technology. most of the information learned in a technology program can be apprenticed

there's no reason why you can't learn to code on the job I learn to code at home it's actually really easy. designing CPU architecture and developing a kernel is a a different story

I would like to point out that you can teach in a classroom or teach on the job you are going to learn more from being on the job, period. I can take someone who doesn't know math, give them a measuring tape teach them how to read and they will be doing fractions in a week or 2

for anyone paying attention the market is still micro crashing

this kind of volatility is unusual especially with the holiday seasons coming up, black friday is one of the days that retailer's and other companies usually gain ground

we are going to know after friday what the hell is going on

a reply to: toysforadults

it's good that you are finally realizing the horrible mess Obama put us in with ACA. Bankrupting a nation to make insurance companies super rich. He sold us out.

I'm starting to think the Boomers have no f#ing clue what an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy even looks like. I got a nice heckle in the grocery self-checkout over my phone by someone assuming I had a Galaxy in my hand, "Hrmph, wouldn't need a coupon if you didn't have that overpriced Samsung."

My "Samsung" is a $50 ALCATEL.

If it wasn't for my husband shushing me and hurrying us out the door saying, "Not worth it, stupid people aren't worth it, just let them think they're smart & let's go" I'd have rammed that budget Tracfone smartphone right up that Boomer's smug butt.

I have only one friend that even HAS a overpriced smartphone, and they can technically afford it after basics and retirement savings are met. Nobody else I know owns an iPhone or anything else ridiculously overpriced. Most of my friends, who run the age gamut from early 30's to pushing 50, have old Qwertys and there's even a flip phone in the mix. The few of us who do have a smartphone? Nobody paid over $100. But damn near every one of us has had a comment at one point or another from some smug, not-so-smart, holier-than-thou Boomer making a comment.

Face it.
You don't know what the difference is between smartphones and simply assume.

originally posted by: toysforadults
I don't think we've gained any efficiency from education I think it comes from technology. most of the information learned in a technology program can be apprenticed

But technology is developed through education.

there's no reason why you can't learn to code on the job I learn to code at home it's actually really easy. designing CPU architecture and developing a kernel is a a different story

It depends on what you're programming. If you're just taking a formula and converting it to code and there are no time or memory constraints, then yes it's not very hard. Where the difficulty comes in, is in system architecture, optimization, and working within your constraints. For example, understanding how a system works and where the constraints are so you know if it would be better to use an O(N) space/runtime algorithm or an O(N log N) runtime but O(N^2) space algorithm. Furthermore, how do power requirements change the system (especially important on mobile devices).

I would like to point out that you can teach in a classroom or teach on the job you are going to learn more from being on the job, period. I can take someone who doesn't know math, give them a measuring tape teach them how to read and they will be doing fractions in a week or 2

But, learning on the job puts all of the risk on the employer. They spend the money to train you and then you go elsewhere. It's also not an accredited education, so experience on a resume doesn't mean anything. If I have on my resume that I took a class on building compilers from an accredited university then the company I'm interviewing with can infer certain things from that. However, if I say I worked for such and such company on a team and my role was to compile code, they can't really infer anything... my job could have been anything from low level optimization to hitting a button because company standards are much wider than university standards.

“The 2.8 percent COLA announced today brings needed income security to those Social Security beneficiaries and their families who depend on their earned, modest benefits. The COLA is particularly important for the tens of millions of families who depend on Social Security for all or most of their income, many of whom may have lost ground … Great Recession.
Unfortunately, the cost of living increase may not adequately cover their expenses that rise faster than inflation..."
source: AARP


In the meanwhile, we retirees waited more than 8 Years for the paper-thin 2.8% COLA cost-of-living-allowance increase...
thank goodness a GOP POTUS was in office or else that increase would have been manipulated Away...Again


ETA:


now I gotta figure how to stretch that $39 per month to buy more processed foods/over-the-air-TV/etc. ---> but WTH... I might just use the cola to buy lottery tickets & hope for a Bonanza Payday to set aside the imposed Austerity for a time ---> cheers