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As a youngster raised for some years in what was considered the poor side of town so to speak (Compton CA) - where non-whites are/were a majority - versus our present state - where the largest minority are indigenous native americans (<6%) - it's pretty obvious there's a major FALLACY that only illegal aliens will work as restaurant dishwashers, landscapers, roofer helpers, busboys, laborers, car wash dryer/vacuum etc. It was a weirdly eye opening - experience. People do whatever they have to to put food on the table - including yours truly.
As for schadenfreude - judging another as enjoying another's pain?
Best to read or re-read Mathew 7: 1&2 again.

duno - - turns on how 'used' & optioned. 2-yr-old 4x4 Duramax can still bring in $60k

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Legal judgement is not the same as seeing and remembering hands on experience with truly crappy products. For example, I hate to remove parts in the engine compartment to change the left rear spark plug of that 400 ci engine. Forgiveness is NOT forgetting.

However, I am pleased to understand you’ve bought a Detroit car/pickup, schadenfreude. Like chastity, a well earned reward.

Bob Wilson

 

The farm workers from Mexico have been getting us our produce at better prices since California was still part of Mexico. Let them come and do that hard work. My immigrant grandparents came and worked hard in factories in Chicago, or other businesses. It’s true they went through Ellis Island. Average American kids can’t do crop farm work by hand, and what they can do they expect 200k per year salary for light work, imo.
So let the Mexican workers come and gain citizenship by legal channels at the border like my grandparents did, what’s wrong with that? We need more workers to compete and keep inflation down. Don’t worry if they have browner skin.

 

I can’t afford to operate anything other than my Tesla and BMW EVs. Solar roof is saving $100-150 per month and I drive as many miles as I wish everyday.

My Tesla is over 160,000 miles and the BMW over 75,000 miles. Free miles out to a radius of 100 miles from Huntsville. It is called independent living.

Bob Wilson

 

In the 70s, our pastor more than once mentioned he was picking cotton in the early fifties - right alongside legal migrant Farm workers. It's not just migrant workers that will do hard work for low wages. On the other hand?
Gavin Newsom requires $20 an hour minimum for flipping burgers. What do you think our/ your strawberries or other manual labor intensive crops will cost at those rates -

 

I did a 5-year mile for mile cost analysis for my current '23 GMC Sierra Pro (base plus towing and a very few convenience options) and a base T3 with federal tax kick-backs.
This was prompted by an executive decision from my CFO to 'get a truck!'
I tried to get a small Toyota but once again I was saved by the folks in Aichi, JA.
The decision on my part came down to either a GMC Pro model or a base T3......provided that I could have talked my CFO into getting a compact BEV.
You CAN tow with a T3 a little, and I have a trailer rated for 3000# so 'technically' a T3 'could' meet my needs, even if it is a small car with one fewer seatbelts, horrible ground clearance, and a reduced road trip capability.
I ran the numbers and showed my work.
At the end of 5 years the GMC crushed the T3 in overall cost of ownership taking into account the real-world street value of each after 100,000 miles, taxes, insurance, registration fees, projected gas and electricity prices, etc...etc....
Repair estimates, were not factored since these are subjective and thus it was (and is) presumed that each vehicles would be cost-free for repairs for the first 100k miles and I factored in things like routines for the truck with a 3000 mile OCI for filters, and I presumed one set of replacement tires for each.
The T3 started out being VERY cheap to operate but not cheap to own - and after the first 100,000 miles there is a dizzying drop in street value because of the (false, IMHO) presumption that a $15,000 battery replacement is inbound.
Actually?
Since they're not spreading rock salt on the sidewalks down in HELL, the whole GMC v T3 was really nothing more than a thought experiment, but it is good to know that I got the vehicle that I wanted more AND that the TCO is lower than it would have been with a BEV - even though I would have had a GREAT excuse to stop at Buc-ees for an hour....TWICE during my sojourns to the home sod severla times a year.

Currently, the Tesla is at an additional disadvantage in my prognostications since I presumed at the time that we would continue to have high gas prices - so it would appear that over two years ago I made the right call.
The current blue-hair mafia rage against Musk is a 'push.'
It is making Teslas cheaper to buy in the near term but it's not doing much for the residuals on the back side.
what effects the tax kickbacks being eliminated is also not doing Tesla, but 2-1/2 years ago they were a non-trivial factor.

Statistics is still a 'science'
BUT....
Math is still math.

 

As much as they should.

Federal minimum wage works as long as there are enough safe, habitable apartments for rent below $400/mo in the same zipcode as that job, and a car payment for a reliable car is no more than $150/mo.

Until we have a better supply of cheap-enough housing and transportation, the strawberries need to cost more. Landlords and car dealers are hoovering it all up to feather their own nests, so the effects will ripple through the whole economy.

 

EV technology continues to change so my 2019 Model 3 is just a snapshot of six years ago. Sad to say Tesla never improved the basic performance. Better manufacture but the same miles/kWh. Yet it still achieves #3 spot.

Happily I have the experience to choose a better replacement in the future.

Bob Wilson

 

So true about housing and inflation.
Now I have no idea how someone making $15 at a fast food can afford to live. It’s not slowly putting fries into a cup and pretending that is the work like 47 pretended. They are zooming all day.

 

It is so interesting to hear opinions and life experiences from others.

My experiences mirror yours when growing up - working in the tobacco fields, harvesting crops, working as a janitor, fast food cook, painter etc - around here all kids do that growing up. Some of the latter jobs were to pay for college etc. I then entered the Armed Services to learn a trade - and also because I was drafted by Uncle Sam. ...and again nothing special there - most every young fellow I knew had a similar story.

At no time in my life did I think working in a tobacco field, picking fruit, or working in fast food was supposed to be a life supporting endeavor or a career destination - not because there is anything wrong with the job or working it- but because it requires minimum skills and education you kind of knew it would never be a destination job.

Coming from a large family with minimal resources the Armed Services- Education- hard work- initiative and some luck were my way to enter into a better life for myself and family.

At no time did it ever occur to me that someone owed me a minimum wage- a place to stay (housing) - provide me food (food stamps) or give me money (welfare).

I do help others, give to charity and volunteer in the community and very much enjoy helping others and giving someone else a boost up... at no time in my life did I ever feel I was entitled to any of that.
I did have others help me in life and I greatly appreciated it, they didn't have to do it and I never expected it from them. I remember them very fondly.

 

this ain't the 50's.

 

The problem is, honestly, the cost of living is just so much higher. In the US and everywhere else.

No one *wants* to be on food stamps, it's at best a subsidy it doesn't actually support a proper grocery cart at all.

There's nothing wrong with a social safety net that helps people who hit hard times. And there's nothing wrong with trying to use the economy of scale that government can support to better provide supports to more people than individual charities can't support.

I don't think people feel entitled, but I think we all deserve some baseline level of things in terms of livelihood. We should have access to affordable healthcare, affordable housing, groceries - stuff that lines up with what an average person can expect to make in terms of salary. People want to have families, but many can't afford them because rent and mortgage just cost so damn much - for example. For young people today, cost of living is just really out of whack relative to salaries, and its especially bad in the US. Even for apprenticeship schools and stuff like that, from all I've seen and read. There's just a big friction there and that's a problem.

And, no disrespect, older generations really don't understand just how bad its gotten and how oppressive it feels. To many young people it feels more like the 1930s, than anything else. Sure there are some really accessible salves that may look like excess - in the form of smartphones and social media. But these are just the inexpensive vices of the modern era, things we can use to distract ourselves and feel better because they're cheap in the short term, and they fill the existential void that is the prospect of - for example - saving 200,000 as a down payment on an 800,000 dollar home that would have been called a "starter" home 30 years ago, while making a combined income of 95,000 as a couple even if you don't have student loans. It feels so daunting, and is very difficult when rent is 30,000 a year plus utilities, and taxes. Plus bills, some debts, etc. So what is an extra $20 a month to get the fancy version of the iphone as part of your new phone plan. Right? Older gens see the small luxuries that used to be hyper expensive, but are now affordable. But ignore that the previously affordable necessities now feel like luxuries.

There's almost a flip on salaries can afford the extras more easily than they can afford the must haves that have long term payoff.

 

watch your pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves

 

That is a major simplification though.

At this point every dollar feels like a penny. so its more like watch your dollars and the benjamins will take care of themselves. And that still feels very dismissive of the very real issues people are facing.

Let's say you do save those $20 dollars a month. Maybe you save $100 dollars a month cutting back on stuff. That's $1200 a year. If you make $90,000 a year as a household, and you want $200,000 to buy a house, and you're already saving, idk, $1500 a month. How much of a difference does $1200 a YEAR make? If that was being applied to a mortgage, the difference adds up over time. When you're applying it to a savings account, it means next to nothing. It doesn't grow the same way on the same timeline when you realize that the 200k only represents the START of a 30 year mortgage.

The floor, the baseline to access things, just feels so much further away for so many more people than it has in a long time.

And that's if young people even get a job, they have the highest unemployment of any other age group across north america and europe.

It sucks. The stagnation of wages and way money's just funnelled up over time to the richest of the rich, and everything gets more expensive, that's a major problem.

 

Inaccurate since we register our sex offenders:


List the Hispanic sex offenders near me, fool.

Demonizing a people is so:


It is close enough to Huntsville for a day trip. Probably Thursday, September 11.

This is the legacy our sociopath in Chief wants to bring back by repeating his:

It has been the common refrain from too many members of our species.

Bob Wilson

 

living frugally is a mindset. people come in all varieties. one thing that has changed is corporations buying up housing, driving up prices. should be illegal, but you won't hear that from either side of the aisle

 

One came in Monday's mail offering ~$240,000 with a "Not A Check" look alight. Just sharing, not negotiating:

My favorite "cold call":

• Voice - "Robert, we would like to buy your house."
• Robert - "You can buy it at my estate sale,"
• Voice - "Great! When and where is that?"
• Robert - "When I'm dead. Come to the estate sale at the house."
• Voice - "Oh ... <click>"

Thinking about getting some postcards made to reply to these solicitations.

Bob Wilson

 

That last line about driving ans many miles as you wish ...

Look up some figures on the pollution due to tire wear. . I was surprised.

 

We have a rental, not to feather our nest but just to make ends meet in retirement as well as help our less fortunate family members - & so we aren't a burden on the supply of gub'ment cheese (which, I've benefited from long ago) etc, that's better served up to others. And it brings income into uncle sam. Never mind that acquiring income property is often a risky thing that financially kills some. Guess that's just too bad though?