US History: Knowledge and Myth

"upper ~1%" of what? Stress, obesity, health problems, number of work hours, most widgets stored in the attic. In case you haven't noticed, this is a very unhealthy society; not much to brag about any more.

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i think he's referring to people in colorado, who tend to be very young and fit. i'm bringing down the curve here.

 

The U.S. economy is perceived to be in positive growth because of artificial props provided by the government in the form of bail-outs and stimulus plans. Yes, if someone gives me a bunch of free money, it's likely I'll spend it which is what is being seen. The intent of the government plans was to create jobs. The reports I've seen indicate there's been very little job growth. At least locally, a lot of the government funding has gone into funding highway programs under the guise that highway programs create jobs. Economic analysts have mixed opinions on the state of the economy. While economic analysts never speak with a unified opinion, I sense more disparity now.

If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past 5 years, it was in a free-fall until early 2009. From mid-2007 until December 2008 it lost half it's value. What happened in early 2009? The stimulus plans and bailouts started to roll out. Are the effects real? Personally I moved large sums of my retirement savings out of stock-related investments into bonds while I wait for the economy to sort itself out.

 

These are all problems of the individual, they're not real problems, said person made it that way. You want real hardship, go live in Dafur, or Tajikistan where you in fact don't live there and probably migrated to Russia to be able to send your family any kind of money, or Uganda where you might be raped and killed by the Lord's Resistance Army, North Korea where instead of malnutrition many people are at the starvation level, or Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, ect where the drought threatens the food situation of the whole country.

I'm not going to feel sorry for someone who's fat and feels overworked at their air conditioned job. First world problems are a joke. We have so much free time we find and make up diseases to diagnoses ourselves with.

Also

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8599343.stm

Why is recession the end of the world to some people, the dow jones will and is recovering, industrial output around the entire world not just the US is picking up, unemployment stagnated and is beginning to fall. Within a year or 2 we're going to go back exactly to how it was a year or two ago and set the conditions for it to happen all over again. It's only what's been happening for the past 150 years.

 

So who are you insinuating is fat and has an air-conditioned job? Personally I'm quite trim, my BMI is well within healthy limits, I exercise regularly, I eat healthy foods, and I've worked my ass off in shit jobs to where I can now appreciate the comforts I enjoy because of my efforts. I'm still not above crawling under my car and getting greasy, doing home improvement projects, and helping others who need my skills. You should know your audience before making such grandiose statements. Didn't you mention you're an unemployed college drop-out? As for first world problems being a joke, can we then assume you're donating your free-time to third-world relief efforts? Which diseases are you referring to? As you get older and experience some of the physical changes you'll be damn glad to have a good doctor to properly diagnose and treat those ailments that seem so alien at present.

I hope you're right, but I'm not willing to gamble my money on it. The stock market is a very unstable place these days. I've got some money in it, but I'm definitely hedging my bets. If you look at the DJIA since the 1920's you'll notice its behavior the last 10 years is unlike anything it's ever done before. It's erratic. Prior to 2000, one could invest their money in stocks and expect to realize an 11% return; that was the historical average. These days you can buy into the market and lose your shirt without venturing into high risk investments.

 

Yes I am an unemployed college drop out, but I'm not the one complaining about first world problems of being obese and stressed. The fact you have a doctor to treat said ailments for example puts you ahead of a good deal of the world. Whether you, I, or anyone in this thread is fit, active, ect doesn't apply to the rest of our obese nation.

And the stock market has never been certain, part of the problem of using prior 2000 is the gigantic dot.com boom of the 90's skews the results, which is specifically why you need to use post 2000 too. I mean remember this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)

How many people lost millions of dollars in one day. The stock market is always a gamble, stocks can't rise indefinitely despite the false sense that overtakes a lot of people, it's knowing when to cash out. How much of that 11% if specifically because of the dot.com boom? Look at the stagnation of the DOW jones during the late 60's to the early 80's, it basically stayed level for over a decade, I wonder the return for 15 years was back then. Stock brokers constantly tell people not to expect 10% return just because that's the average, that includes the average of people who own millions of shares and are deep in the economic world and know how the world markets are reacting and what to expect in the future.


There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

 

Please see the following: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB112086605603581092.html

It's just the teaser, but it has the data. Barrons is a reputable financial source.

The plot you show is a semi-log plot. These serve two functions. First, they're used to display data across multiple orders of magnitude. Second, they can hide embarrassing data anomalies because they compress the data. A linear plot along both axes is shown below. This better displays the erratic behavior since 2000.

And if you've taken as many math, calculus, differential equations, numerical methods, linear algebra, and probability and statistics courses as I have, you can readily tell the difference.

 

Are you the guy who kicks the blind amputee every morning at the street corner and tells him to get a job?

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I fail to see the problem, there's nothing erratic about this, it's how markets work when they're interfered with. Following the dot.com boom the federal reserve and government tried to make a new bubble in the housing market that had already been going before the dot.com burst to help try to recover the economy. Notice the gigantic climb? Why is that not erratic? This is just the market straitening itself out after years of living on false investments. Everyone from the individual to banks lived outside their means and when it finally came crashing down at once we act surprised at it. There had been numerous economists warning since 2005-06 that a giant crash was going to come if we didn't reign it in, just like they're now afraid the same thing is going to happen in China. Unfortunately it didnt' say in the just the housing bubble and caused a domino effect that if anything positive came out of it showed us serious institutional and regulatory problems in both the financial sector along within some of our largest industries.

There's nothing erratic about the market except too many people convinced before this that somehow the outrageous growth would never end.

Let's come back to this thread in 1 1/2 year, I'm willing everything will be back exactly how it was 5 years ago with some new bubble fueling ridiculous growth and people ignoring most recent history. Remember a year ago people were predicting this would be the next great depression, the official unemployment rate reaching 20%, no growth for years, ect. People have a doom sector of their brain I believe, when things go back, everything seems to implode.

No, I'm the guy who doesn't use:

As an example of the major problems suffered by the people in the world who among the Earth's highest living standards. Homeless guy on the street is not living the life 99% of Americans are. Even the very poor in America while not being able to buy a lot of food are often eligible for food stamps from a government that doesn't threaten to kill them if they speak out, and they know when they go to the store there will in fact be food at the market.

 

You're not reading my posts, yours or maybe both. You have totally mis-characterized my response to your statement. Why don't you reread your statement and my response to it.

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Dude at this point you're grasping at straws. That data's as erratic as it gets. You must have been the annoying guy in the back of the class who continued to ask senseless questions of the prof when you'd hopelessly lost the argument. You're through.

I hope you're right, but I'm not about to jump on the stimulus boom and jump head over heels back into the stock market. As for being willing to bet everything things will be better, what does "everything" include?

Who doesn't use what?

How did we get to homeless guys on the street? The U.S. has slipped behind much of Europe as far as standard of living. Their collective GDP may be comparable to ours, but they make better decisions about how to use it. The U.S. spends far too much on its military; we're not under attack, nor have we been in the last 60+ years. We've got entitlement programs that are being abused yet no one does anything about it. Politicians are afraid to do anything to clean up the system for fear of negative career impacts. Our national debt is comparable to our GDP. Countries loan us money so they can call in favors when the time is right, not because we're the standard of financial success.