The Nation's Financial Condition

[cradleandshoot]

I had a good friend in my platoon who lived off post with his wife and young daughter. It was a constant struggle for them every month to make ends meet. It was hard enough for them with the time he spent away from them for weeks at a time. When your serving your country and can't afford to feed your family something is seriously wrong with a system that can allow that to happen.

I'm sure the next time your party gets into power they will finally address the issue more than the D's have...

Not very likely, I don't have a party and I never will. If it makes you happy I have always considered myself a Democrat. My first vote for POTUS was for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I'm highly critical of your party because they lost their way and they don't represent my beliefs today. So what we have in America today are 2 political parties that are both so utterly corrupt that they don't represent the majority of Americans anymore. If you don't believe me why are the #s independents growing more every day?

[Typical Lax Dad]

I had a good friend in my platoon who lived off post with his wife and young daughter. It was a constant struggle for them every month to make ends meet. It was hard enough for them with the time he spent away from them for weeks at a time. When your serving your country and can't afford to feed your family something is seriously wrong with a system that can allow that to happen.

I'm sure the next time your party gets into power they will finally address the issue more than the D's have...

Not very likely, I don't have a party and I never will. If it makes you happy I USED TO considered myself a Democrat….LIKE THE DIXIECRATS. My first vote for POTUS was for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I'm highly critical of your party because they lost their way and they don't represent my beliefs today. So what we have in America today are 2 political parties that are both so utterly corrupt that they don't represent the majority of Americans anymore. If you don't believe me why are the #s independents growing more every day?

FIXED IT

[PizzaSnake]

Best take on the “American Dream” I’ve seen. From op-ed piece in NYT today. Costica Bradatan.

“Apart from a remarkable gift for failing, Romanians have a knack for living in a state of painful separation, leaving a place and missing it unbearably. “Dor” (from the Latin “dolor,” or “pain”), the word used to express that state, is one of the most defining in the Romanian vocabulary. Many a folk song, countless poems and even works of philosophy have been built around this one word.

When my turn came to follow this tradition, it was a relatively simple decision. I would emigrate to the United States. For I knew right away that America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.”

[youthathletics]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

[NattyBohChamps04]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

[youthathletics]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

[NattyBohChamps04]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

Nope. Workers just need to work harder and move up the ladder. CEOs obviously work hundreds to thousands of times harder and deserve their big pay and golden parachutes. No reason regular workers can't all be CEOs at their place of work. Imagine if a company only hired CEOs. They'd be so much more efficient than hiring blue collar people. You'd see record profits.

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on the previous post.

[Typical Lax Dad]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

Nope. Workers just need to work harder and move up the ladder. CEOs obviously work hundreds to thousands of times harder and deserve their big pay and golden parachutes. No reason regular workers can't all be CEOs at their place of work. Imagine if a company only hired CEOs. They'd be so much more efficient than hiring blue collar people. You'd see record profits.

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on the previous post.

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

[cradleandshoot]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

Nope. Workers just need to work harder and move up the ladder. CEOs obviously work hundreds to thousands of times harder and deserve their big pay and golden parachutes. No reason regular workers can't all be CEOs at their place of work. Imagine if a company only hired CEOs. They'd be so much more efficient than hiring blue collar people. You'd see record profits.

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on the previous post.

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

[Typical Lax Dad]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

Nope. Workers just need to work harder and move up the ladder. CEOs obviously work hundreds to thousands of times harder and deserve their big pay and golden parachutes. No reason regular workers can't all be CEOs at their place of work. Imagine if a company only hired CEOs. They'd be so much more efficient than hiring blue collar people. You'd see record profits.

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on the previous post.

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

I agree.

[Farfromgeneva]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7109006773

Abstract

In social and biological systems, there are obvious individual divergence and asymmetric payoff phenomenon due to the strength, power and influence differences. In this paper, we introduce an asymmetric payoff mechanism to evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG) on scale-free networks. The co-effects of individual diversity and asymmetric payoff mechanism on the evolution of cooperation and the wealth distribution under different updating rules are investigated. Numerical results show that the cooperation is highly promoted when the hub nodes are favored in the payoff matrix, which seems to harm the interest of the majority. But the inequality of social wealth distribution grows with the unbalanced payoff rule. However, when the node difference is eliminated in the learning strategy, the asymmetric payoff rule will not affect the cooperation level. Our work may sharpen the understanding of the cooperative behavior and wealth inequality in the society.

Introduction

Game theory provides a natural framework to study the emergence and evolution of cooperation in biological and social systems [1], [2], [3], [4]. In the original prisoner’s dilemma game (PDG), two players can simultaneously choose to cooperate or defect and they are offered some payoffs depending on their choices. The players both receive reward
upon mutual cooperation and punishment
upon mutual defection. If one cooperator meets a defector, the cooperator (C) gets the lowest payoff
(sucker’s payoff), while the defector (D) gains the highest payoff
(temptation to defect). The elements of the payoff matrix must satisfy the conditions:
and
. Since selfish players want to maximize their own profit during a single round game, they choose defection.

The unstable cooperation in PDG is opposite to the observations in the real world. This disagreement thus stimulates a variety of suitable extensions of basic model rules to explain the emergence and persistence of cooperation. An original work by Nowak and May showed that the PDG on a simple spatial structure can induce the emergence of cooperation [5]. Inspired by the idea of spatial game, much attention has been given to the evolutionary games on several population relations, including regular networks [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13] and complex networks [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25]. More interestingly, many realistic phenomena are also introduced into evolutionary games, such as “breast-for-tat” [3], [26], “win stay and lose shift” [27], memory effects [28], [29], aspiration effects [30], [31], adaptive networks with alternative interactions [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], reward and punishment [37], variation in strategy transfer capability [38], environmental noise [39], [40] and payoff noise [41], [42], [43], [44], [45]. For a recent review, one can refer to Szabó and Fath [46].

The game theory is also related to the economic behavior of human society. The distribution of wealth among individuals in an economy has been an important area of research in economics for more than a hundred years [47]. The evolutionary networked game is also adopted to study the personal wealth distribution in the society [48], [49].

In most real situations, the individuals in a social or biological system are heterogeneous in their power, wealth and influence. Recently, the impact of “social diversity” of individuals on game theory begins to attract attention [50], [51]. The difference in the population can lead to complicated phenomena in the society. For example, in commercial activities, some powerful corporations can use their strength or power to force their weak co-players to make an unfair deal. On the contrary, many welfare policies are developed to protect the disadvantaged groups. Since unbalanced payoff distribution is common in reality, it is worth considering the asymmetric payoff mechanism in the evolutionary game theory. Indeed, the characteristic of “social diversity” can be represented by the degree heterogeneity in the underlying social structure. And the effects of node heterogeneity on cooperation and wealth distribution have been widely investigated on this framework [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [48], [49], [52], [53]. However, the co-effects of individual heterogeneity and asymmetric payoff mechanism are not well understood up to now.

In this paper, we introduce an asymmetric payoff rule for PDG on a scale-free network, in which the nodes are intrinsically heterogeneous in their degree. The asymmetric payoff can be tuned by an only parameter
. In this rule, the rich exploits the poor to get richer when
, reflecting the unfair deals in reality. When
, the rich are forced to offer some payoff to the poor, reflecting the welfare policies. By simulation, we demonstrated: (i) The asymmetric payoff rule can cooperate with the node degree heterogeneity to greatly promote cooperation for the system when
; (ii) When the effect of degree heterogeneity is eliminated in the learning strategy, the asymmetric payoff rule cannot change the overall cooperation frequency for the system; (iii) The asymmetric payoff rule can also affect the distribution of personal wealth in the system, which is evaluated by the Gini coefficient and the Pareto exponent.

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the evolutionary games and the asymmetric payoff mechanism are introduced. The simulation results and discussions are given in Section 3. And the paper is concluded by the last section.

[PizzaSnake]

U.S. Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased? : https://fanlax.com/forum/posting.php?mo ... f=66&t=380

In the paycheck: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings
have increased by 5.1 percent.

Large Delta% between the two.

That's just for the plebes.

Best paid CEOs see pay rocket up 26% in 2021

Any worker can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make their way up the ladder to CEO. Instead they just sit around and complain.

You proved the point with an awful take on the data. We are seeing record income for C-Suites and their businesses...and that is about the only place; in police work they call that a clue. Your bootstrap comment is just plain dumb. In a company with 300 employees, how man CEO's will they have, 270? since the bottom 10% are typically the deadbeats...CMon man.

Nope. Workers just need to work harder and move up the ladder. CEOs obviously work hundreds to thousands of times harder and deserve their big pay and golden parachutes. No reason regular workers can't all be CEOs at their place of work. Imagine if a company only hired CEOs. They'd be so much more efficient than hiring blue collar people. You'd see record profits.

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on the previous post.

It's more accurately called sarchasm -- the gulf between what you meant and what the reader perceived...

[HooDat]

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

I agree.

Except I know plenty (too many) of people who do not work hard at all, but achieve much more financial success playing corporate politics than a lot of hardworking blue collar folks do....

[Typical Lax Dad]

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

I agree.

Except I know plenty (too many) of people who do not work hard at all, but achieve much more financial success playing corporate politics than a lot of hardworking blue collar folks do....

Working smart.

[PizzaSnake]

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

I agree.

Except I know plenty (too many) of people who do not work hard at all, but achieve much more financial success playing corporate politics than a lot of hardworking blue collar folks do....

Tonguing the taint is hard work...

[HooDat]

I thought the only reason people were left behind is because they don’t work hard enough?

Success is never guaranteed. There are many people who bust their ass and never achieve what they want. I know one thing if you don't work hard you will get back just what you put in.

I agree.

Except I know plenty (too many) of people who do not work hard at all, but achieve much more financial success playing corporate politics than a lot of hardworking blue collar folks do....

Tonguing the taint is hard work...

[HooDat]

This chart sums up what I have been saying about our economy favoring capital over production (and rear-ending the working class in the process). The gap between the lines represent the shift in benefits of productivity to capital holders vs workers...



https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequa ... al-worker/

[PizzaSnake]

This chart sums up what I have been saying about our economy favoring capital over production (and rear-ending the working class in the process). The gap between the lines represent the shift in benefits of productivity to capital holders vs workers...



https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequa ... al-worker/

“The Federal Trade Commission took an a bold move on Thursday aimed at shifting the balance of power from companies to workers.

The agency proposed a new rule that would prohibit employers from imposing noncompete agreements on their workers, a practice it called exploitative and widespread, affecting some 30 million American workers.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan in a statement. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/11471380 ... a-khan-ban

[a fan]

This chart sums up what I have been saying about our economy favoring capital over production (and rear-ending the working class in the process). The gap between the lines represent the shift in benefits of productivity to capital holders vs workers...



https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequa ... al-worker/

And the only team with a plan out of this mess is TeamBernie.

We haven't heard a plan from Republicans for 20 years. Unless you want to count "borrow trillions and shotgun it through the economy, and hope the working class gets a taste" as a "plan".

And from what I'm seeing from the House and from guys like DeSantis? We're about to lose another generation to these clods.

So will the Dems turn to the libs with Nancy Departing? Or will it be more of the Clintonian economic trickle down policies?

[a fan]

This chart sums up what I have been saying about our economy favoring capital over production (and rear-ending the working class in the process). The gap between the lines represent the shift in benefits of productivity to capital holders vs workers...



https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequa ... al-worker/

“The Federal Trade Commission took an a bold move on Thursday aimed at shifting the balance of power from companies to workers.

The agency proposed a new rule that would prohibit employers from imposing noncompete agreements on their workers, a practice it called exploitative and widespread, affecting some 30 million American workers.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan in a statement. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/05/11471380 ... a-khan-ban

Huh. Well how about that. Actual F'ing policy. Cool.