iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Torsten might be right, but not because of this analysis. It’s certainly plausible that nearly all of the cash flow upside of AI goes to the technology sector, especially considering they are almost all of the consumers today. Smartphones are huge and Apple takes most of the profit in that market

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That is literally not what the poll says. The poll shows people saying they personally are doing at least ok, while the local economy and national economy are doing much worse.

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You’re going to get condescension when you reply to a thread about US macroeconomic conditions with a “but what about MEEEE” post: bsky.app/profile/gree...

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You are describing “income equality” and yes, it does mean things heavily dependent on human labor (restaurants, coffee shops, delivery, concerts, education, etc.) become relatively less affordable for the middle class.

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Base pay has grown for restaurant workers: report

Incidentally, the people who work at restaurants have done especially well lately as wages have grown fastest in the lowest income segments. www.restaurantdive.com/news/restaur...

restaurantdive.com

A steady rise in base wages has shrunk tips as a proportion of compensation, but the median tipped worker still gets $14.48 an hour in tips, per ADP.

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Correct. Set-asides are unnecessary. They haven’t worked anywhere. Portland is just one of many examples.

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Stocks and bonds aren’t accounted for in the other chart. This chart you’re showing is demonstrating how US-based corporations have benefited most from globalization.

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I am not sure how you got to “the economy is fine” from “more people eat outside the home today than in 2008”, but you’re right that the government doesn’t poll you and your friends. They poll a random selection of 10s of thousands of Americans (plus track direct spending in some cases)

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Yes. I think it’s good more of us work in offices instead of farms and factories, even if this means our employers have to spend money on computers and cubicles instead of our salaries

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I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for this, which this character limit is too small to contain

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Portland Real Estate Is Such a Mess That All Housing Is Affordable Housing

Everyone is right to be dismissive of those proposals because they don’t work. In Portland, market rate rents are now lower than rents on affordable housing because they built so many free-market apartments. It’s not complicated! www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

wsj.com

Rarely has the Oregon city seen such a narrow price gap between market-rate and affordable units.

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Also, this is one of those cursed charts that will always make people mad but never go the other direction. In a developed economy, workers need equipment (provided by their employer) to do their jobs. Labor is getting a slightly smaller slice of a much larger pie (and more pie overall)

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Food-away-from-home spending share peaked in 2023 | Economic Research Service

The question economists are asking is “do Americans eat out more than they did in 2008?”, not “does Josh?” or “does Andrew?” The answer to the former is yes: www.ers.usda.gov/data-product...

ers.usda.gov

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Andrew Rivas @rivasad.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Especially when you consider this is “per population” and not “per household” when households today are smaller than they were 50 years ago!

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Andrew Rivas @rivasad.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

How exactly would the mayor of NYC issue a pardon on behalf of the state of NY? I mean, maybe Mamdani runs for governor in 2030 but that doesn’t do Trump much good.

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Andrew Rivas @rivasad.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I’m with you, that’s why private school outcomes and charter school outcomes are basically equivalent after normalizing for parental income. Except catholic school which for some reason has a slight but statistically significant improvement in outcomes

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I’m with you. But the reality is when you increase funding for schools, much of that money goes to superfluous buildings and administrative staff. Thus, $/pupil being a poor correlation with educational outcomes.

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Correct, that’s why I called out the ability to expel disruptive students. This is the main mechanism for why charter schools perform better than other public schools. But they don’t perform any better than the best-performing cohort, Catholic schools (normalizing for HH income), which aren’t union

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You have just listed a bunch of evidence that $/student is not correlated to educational outcomes.

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Just look at the spending and outcomes between NH and VT like I mentioned. Or you can compare NYC and DC (the 2 most expensive $$$/pupil) to anywhere else. Carmel spends about half what Indianapolis does per pupil with MUCH better outcomes.

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There is very little correlation between $/student and student outcomes (NH v VT is a great illustration). The largest lever in public school achievement is student disruption. The best results have come from increasing the length of the school day and school years for low income kids

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There is no evidence unions make for better teachers. Private schools in the US are overwhelmingly non-union and the outcomes are slightly better (probably due to ability to expel disruptive students and not a function of the teachers themselves)

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Ta-Da! You have described the school funding mechanism in Texas!

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I think your argument hinges on whether international signing bonuses, MiLB salaries/bonuses, etc. would count against the proposed salary cap. I don’t understand how this could work in practice since MiLB is now unionized and operates under a separate agreement (and independent MiLB owners and rev)

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I think the question is actually “could the ROC have done it with fewer deaths?” and based on what happened in Taiwan, the answer is clearly “yes”

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“Anyone” is certainly ridiculous, but the only other reasonable alternative (Chiang Kai-Shek/the ROC) demonstrated in Taiwan contemporaneously that the alternative was superior

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I have a Principal dev on my team who has been coding for 40+ years. He started with AI tools almost a year ago and now he’s like 5 Principal devs in 1. It’s crazy!

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I should have said “significantly more than 50%”. Player share of revenue in MLB peaked about 20 years ago but hasn’t kept pace with the other 3 major leagues since.

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CEOs are both management and workers. They are not ownership in most cases

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My revenue numbers are just correct. Bryce Harper’s worker cohort is Bryce Harper. He is no different from a CEO

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Athletes in the Big 4 have much more in common with CEOs (who are workers) than they do with Teamsters. Bryce Harper isn’t out advocating for higher pay at the concessions stand, he’s looking out for #1

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The MLB players are the only group of players in the Big 4 whose compensation hasn’t kept pace with revenue growth. The MLBPA wants to get back to the era of the early 2000s when players made more than 50% of revenue, but that’s never going to happen again.

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Meh, if the billionaires are motivated to get a few members of congress on an “EA party” in some hypothetical PR system in the US, they would. They’ve got 22% of the Supreme Court already!

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“Who’s the best player in the world? No, besides him, I’m tired of him. Fine, let’s give Benzema a turn”

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The issue you’re pointing out is that voters are people of the land, the common clay of the new West, you know, morons. But this is a feature of democracy, not a bug.

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Unlimited money faucet AND good decision making (see: NY Mets)

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The players in the MLB receive a smaller share of revenues than the 3 other major US sports leagues, all of which have salary caps, and all of which are growing revenues (and thus player salaries) faster than MLB (And we need to stop treating MLB players like Teamsters, they’re more like CEOs)

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