Yep. It’s much better to focus on your quality of life right now, while keeping an eye on the back of your head for the future but I saw so many people just sacrificing everything to get that extra 20% salary, without realising inflation catches up to it faster than you get raises.
I want the salary that allows me to be independent, take care of my family and have time to spend with them, and that doesn’t involve crushing my soul. Living life as happy as possible right now is more important than whatever magical number you think will solve all your problems. Personally I’m trying to achieve that by being a freelance in a passion field.
It depends where you live but it was figured out to be about 110k a decade ago on average in the US. Where I live that sounds pretty close maybe 140. However, I am biased since I truly don’t want to own a house. Would rather rent.
Not just because your friends are there and you’re getting exercise, but also because most professional sports teams are selfish, for profit companies that don’t care about you even when you give them money.
Take 1 trillion dollars from the billionaires in total, now distribute 1K to each person each month? Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
We won’t because billonairs don’t hold the knowledge to run factories, they just monopolize infrastructure and collect a toll. We won’t run out of money because the production is still there.
Then maybe our source of money should be that production, and not the personal wealth of billionaires?
Like, if you make a car that runs on diesel, and there’s a gallon of diesel in the world, you’ve made a car with 1 gallon of fuel.
If you make UBI that runs on the contents of billionaires’ bank accounts, and there’s three months’ worth of money in those bank accounts, you’ve made UBI that works for three months.
Enjoy the fruits of liberated market. /s Honestly though you assume that the only value of liquidating assets from billionaires is getting their dollar amounts moved from on bank to another. There is a reasonable assumption that freeing up that capital to be enthusiastically invested or utilized to meet demands would provide more economic growth than it sitting in large hoards being spent in most risk adverse ways or in near total whimsy.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.
im an american and had never heard of this book before so i had to look it up. it seems extremely impressive that someone would undertake such a breadth of american experiences through its entire history. however, i also saw a lot of criticism that matches what you described. ill give you the same advice id give anyone studying any history: no book is perfect. if you really want to know as much as you can, you’ll have to read a ton of books from a ton of different sources. plenty of people love criticizing america, its very easy to do, but most authors wont try to write with such the breadth that this guy has, due to it often including bias and poor sources. its an easy thing to do poorly. if you want a factual overview of american history, id go for a textbook. you can then deep dive into anything that interests you. if you are interested in varying perspectives, there are plenty of african american, native american, feminist, etc. books. you can look up plenty of different book lists online. just look up the author/book before you leave, as there are plenty of frauds. hope that helps! whats gotten you interested in american history?
Saying you’re looking for a critical alternative sounds strange to this American. Here, that book is the critical alternative. It’s the counterpoint to all the toxic conservative propaganda we’re spoonfed daily. Propaganda that tells us that straight, white, Christian, American men are not only the saviors of democracy, but also the Universe, that God, guns, and money will save us all. That book tells the stories we’re taught to deny. If it doesn’t convince you, it’s because it goes against everything America wants you to believe. If you’re just looking to be mad, turn on Fox News. They’ll tell you plenty of things that are “wrong” with America.
And you don’t see how what you just wrote here could be seen as biased? I think OP’s looking for something outside that point of view you just espoused.
If I recall correctly (and it’s been over a decade since I read that one), Zinn is quite clear from the onset about his stance. (Even the title makes it evident that his perspective isn’t going to follow the traditional USA history narrative.) He sustains his points with empirical evidence, so I would hesitate to call it prejudiced. But there are some issues with some of his sources. (I think Matthew Restall may address some of those.)
How about trying out James Loewen’s Lies My Teachers Told Me? That book explains what I think Zinn was attempting to problematize: the blind acceptance of the biases within historical texts. Loewen aims directly at the USA secondary educational system in particular. You will learn a lot about USA history and why it has been written from a specific angle.
This one is easy. I would simply do what they tell me to do. After all, since they came back to see me, it’s certainly because the future me sent them back in time.
If it wasn’t me that sent them back in time, then it’s probably a set up, and I would be powerless to resist it.
If they insisted on my ordering them around, I’d have them bring back a copy of their Wikipedia from 50 years in the future, and then I’d try to use the rest of the time to figure out the physics behind time travel, and see if I can’t get plans for a time machine.
There are few theoretically possible technologies as overwhelmingly powerful as time machines. Even an extraordinarily weak time machine, for example, one that could only move you a few minutes back and forth, would be enough to make me insanely wealthy, assuming that it wasn’t cost prohibitive to run.
I’m sure it’s not much compared to what many here experienced, but it took me a long time to properly recover from this.
A couple years back on Christmas Eve, a few of my then friends, or at least acquaintances ripped apart my friend group. Doxxed me (I’m told) and slandered me for days. Basically out of nowhere from my perspective. No fights that I can recall were had shortly before and I was still having friendly conversations with the perpetrators that same day. I tried asking the “leaders” what I might’ve been accused of and I never got a single answer. Not even a “you should know”. Just a message from my girlfriend telling me I should go offline for a while and beyond that, radio silence for a solid day.
Some time later my girlfriend told me one of them had been trying for weeks to convince her I was toxic. Manipulative. Untrustworthy. We’re engaged now, somehow. She brings way more to the table than I do, but I do my best to make her days more interesting and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I hope I bring her a similar comfort. I also got back in contact with a few of those old friends a year later.
But for a whole year and out of nowhere, I had to cut contact with essentially everyone I talked to online. And let’s not kid ourselves, I’m an introverted nerd somewhere on the spectrum, that was basically my whole social circle. I’m told their… whatever this all was for ended up imploding, but I learned that day how easy it is to get exploited and mislead by those we trust.
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