You're getting downvoted on Reddit for pointing out that humans are human. This place is depressing sometimes.

I know people who are "against the tipping culture" and want to get rid of it... even though EVERY server I know wants to keep it because they earn more than they would otherwise. A couple of the people I know against tipping will tip far less than I do - and then when I point that out they get defensive and say that the person should be paid a better wage so they don't need tips.

It's impossible to get through their skull that their position is one of selfishness, not altruism.

>If we want OP to earn an actual living wage, with health insurance and coverage for gas and wear and tear on his car, it's gonna cost at least $30 per delivery. Ain't nobody on Earth going to pay that much.

And as a society, we need to ask why they wouldn't.

That person considering paying also has a car, and gas, and wear and tear to pay for. They also have their own time that's worth something to them, just like the driver.

As a society, if we're in a position that someone with valuable time (say, a white-collar worker) and an expensive car with high gas prices CANNOT justify paying someone with less valuable time and a cheaper, better mileage car, we need to ask ourselves why - what barriers are we putting in place?

From an economical standpoint, having someone who earns 7$5k/year be unable to pay someone who earns $40k/year to do a simple task for them just means we have inefficiencies in our system that we need to work out. When we don't work them out, and leave the status quo, we have a far less efficient economy. The 75k guy has to waste his time and burn more gas to achieve something, and the 40k guy misses out on work.

I'd argue that your $30/hr figure is way too high though, given the number of people currently doing this work for far less.

>I have tried to explain that he could make more money literally working at McDonald’s, but he likes the “freedom” of gig driving work.

This is what annoys me about people who attack these jobs. Some people just hate routine, drudgery, or having a boss who tells them what to do and when. They accept a lower wage for delivering things or people because they feel better about life than if they had a higher wage with someone shouting at them because their tie isn't straight, or they didn't scrub the pan hard enough, or they want to take 90 minutes off to watch the game in the middle of the day.

Society seems to have no problem with people saying "I'm going to quit my corporate job and become a baker because even though it only pays one third as much, I feel better doing it" yet the second somebody decides to make a similar choice but going to the gig economy, suddenly it's seen as a problem.

Many of these people couldn't get a "regular" job so having their gig economy job may be better for them than not having it, and many more of them prefer the flexibility and conditions of the gig economy job. Everyone's different.

>17% are unarmed, so start there.

I'm very interest to read the data behind this. Does "unarmed" mean did not have a firearm, or did not have a weapon of any kind? Or were not being violent?

>So your claim is that 80% of guns are owned illegally

Please quote me when you're attempting to voice my claims. I never claimed that.

>The only states approaching 50% ownership are the Dakotas and West Virginia. Most of America’s guns are represented by gun nuts owning multiple.

I'm not sure why legal gun ownership rates have much bearing on this? If the people using guns for violent crime do not legally own them, why would we care in the about legal gun ownerships rates?

>Police killed over 1,000 people in 2021. Almost 3/day, at a rate far higher than any other highly developed nation.

How does that have any bearing on how many unjustified shootings there are?

Given a raw number (1000) without context means nothing. If 999 of them are justified, that's a pretty good rate.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Corporate sized companies like those have pretty strong compliance processes across the board.

Even using a font in an internal presentation generally requires some sort of signoff, or using only fonts from a pre-approved list. And that's not even in the publishing industry, that's pretty standard all over.

So you wouldn't install them on buildings like that?

Primarily these would be installed on buildings in hot climates for most/all of the year.

>If solar is cheap now, it would also be cheaper back twenty, thirty years ago if money had been poured into R&D back then

You're failing to notice the survivor bias in this scenario.

Indeed it doesn't. But to reign in inflation we need to reduce economic activity. Fuel prices are weakly correlated with economic activity so may or may not follow that trend depending on other determining factors.

>To have a roommate, I suppose you have to be someone another person can stand to live with.

As someone who shared a house with housemates for 20 years, you simply have to want a roof over your head more than you dislike your troublesome roommate.

If people are homeless because they don't like living with someone else, or because they're an asshole and nobody else will live with them, I don't see that as a problem for me or society, that's a problem for them to solve.

>There has to be a market solution to homelessness

Some people need to adjust their expectations and room up in a big house with several other people to keep bills low.

Other people are mentally ill, or like to be homeless, and there's little we can do with money or housing policy to help those people.

>Ok but homeless people may be forced to become roommates with another random homeless person just to be able to get a place

I spent my entire life from 21 to 41 years old living with other people, and sharing a house.

Being "forced" to share a house with someone is not a problem and shouldn't be treated as one.

>If you wanted to change the subject you should have specified.

I didn't change the subject.

Someone asked:

>I’m not convinced. You don’t think a decrease in overall economic activity will result in a decrease in fuel consumption (i.e. demand for fuel)?

You responded:

>Not to a large degree, no.

You knew what the subject was, as you were discussing it before I even entered the discussion.

>And OPEC would probably just cut production a little and keep the price the same.

You appear to be talking about gas prices at the pump.

I'm talking about consumption levels. When people buy fewer services and go on fewer trips/holidays, they use less fuel.

Very different things.

>Higher interest rates curb all economic activity, both supply and demand.

But not equally, which is the vital missing link here.

Activities that are currently highly profitable will continue and possibly even grow, despite the higher interest rates.

However, activities which are unprofitable, or who have a long horizon to their ROI break even point will be affected, and will shrink.

That's the whole point. We don't want to curb EVERYTYHING, and we won't. We will leave the important, valuable, today stuff going... but we will lose the less important, less valuable and/or tomorrow stuff.

>Not to a large degree, no. There are way too many other factors causing it right now. The amount of activity it would have to cut would be a disaster.

You don't need a large cut to make a significant impact. Even a 5% fall would be incredibly notable.

Sorry, again. I don't understand.

If some significant portion of drivers refuse to retrain, how does that negatively affect the rest of us? They end up taking more crappy, low-end, jobs... that's not a bad thing for everyone else?

I posted up links specifically to income, taxes, housing costs etc.

Go click on them and read them.

>No, it's literally just wages having stagnated for 50+ years.

LOL again total failure to understand that it's even worse in the UK. Bye

Like I said, not debating with a mental midget. Doubling down on your positions while offering nothing new is not the mark of a good debater. You still don't understand what median means. LOL

>And $67.5k isn't enough to live on. That's why most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Over 2x as many Americans do compared to Brits.

LOL, you're a fool. Americans earn 2x as much, have cheaper equivalent housing, cheaper cars, cheaper gas and much less tax. It's simply not possible - unless the average healthcare spend is 20k+ per working person (hint: it's not) for life to be economically harder for an American than a Brit.

However, it is possible for them to spend stupidly, and end up living paycheck to paycheck.

​

Good day.

>This could not be an issue but the drivers are stupid people so it’s going to be much much worse than it could be.

I don't see the issue. If they choose not to retrain, they're the ones with the issue, not the rest of us.

>Cool beans. Doesn't change the fact that by objective measurements, the US healthcare system is more expensive and has less desirable outcomes.

It is more expensive (that's not always a bad thing, having costs makes things better prioritized, though it's TOO much more expensive) but on outcomes...

It's worth noting that "has less desirable outcomes" mostly comes from stats related to healthcare for the entire population. This means it includes lots of people who don't have health insurance, the homeless etc. This skews the data pretty violently - if you take the subset that have jobs and decent health insurance, you'll find the numbers suddenly look a whole lot better.

>I'm glad you found some sources, but your cherry picked bits of data don't refute the more comprehensive scope of my data.

Wow. Just wow. Which of my data was "cherry-picked" exactly? National medians and averages? How exactly COULD I have cherry picked any of them?

>I've proven that economic mobility in America has all but disappeared.

Tell that to the guy I hired to bring his team to build fencing recently. He immigrated to the US just 15 years ago, spoke almost no English, knew how to weld, but worked his first year in fast food. Since then he got a job welding, then in auto repair, took over the shop, now has a welding company, an auto shop, and about fifteen mostly full time guys doing concrete, welding, fencing etc. He seems to have done fine with NO money, qualifications, contacts and just one vaguely marketable skill.

Just because lots of people are failing doesn't mean it's difficult.

>Now calculate it without the top 10%.

Oh. My. Lord. HOW DUMB ARE YOU? I gave you the MEDIAN figures.

Do you know what median means? Seriously, I'm not debating this with you. I gave you your sources you wanted, and you don't even have the reading/math comprehension of a 14 year old to understand it when the data is distilled down to the most simple presentation possible.

THE MEDIAN INCOME IS THE INCOME OF THE MOST ORDINARY PERSON IN THE COUNTRY.

I'm not going to debate with a mental midget, good day to you, sir.

Indeed, there are many barriers to instant adoption.

>So you don't have enough experience with either France or the US.

How much experience do I need? The healthcare and particularly dentistry that I get here in Northern California is light years ahead of what I got in the UK. How many years do I need to be here before I've experienced enough of the health system for your needs?

I still say the NHS is fantastic for emergencies and life threatening conditions, but useless for anythign else.

>[Citation needed]

Seriously? You weren't aware that the median income in the US is 67.5k USD [1] and in the UK is 31.5k GBP? [2] You need a citation for that? Seriously? Do you need a citation to do the math and realize that income, normalized for currency, is around double that in the US that it is in the UK?

What kind of citations do you need to understand the tax rate differences? That the effective tax rate on 67.5k is only a little higher in the US than it is in the UK on an income less than half that of the US? [3] [4]

Do you need a citation for gas prices being almost double, too? [5]

How about citations for sales tax being less than half (and often infinitely less) than in the UK? [6] [7]

Do you need a citation showing that the average home size in the US is way more than DOUBLE the average home size in the UK, despite costing around the same? [8] [9]

​

>That's a big fucking IF seeing as there are scant few decent jobs.

What the fuck are you talking about? The median person in the US earns around double the median person in the UK. There are literally tens and tens of millions of good jobs. Clearly, obviously, based on them all paying so well.

You needed me to give you citations for headline figures that are readily available. Things that literally ANYONE with any knowledge of these two countries knows without needing to look it up.

You appear to have no first-hand knowledge, no awareness of the differences, and are just attempting to put the US down while failing to understand that the real data points to the opposite of your conclusions.

​

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html#:~:text=Highlights,and%20Table%20A%2D1).

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/financialyearending2021#:~:text=Median%20household%20disposable%20income%20in,(ONS%20Household%20Finances%20Survey.

[3] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes#FoQE9iKTft

[4] https://www.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php

[5] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

[6] https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates

[7] https://taxfoundation.org/2022-sales-taxes/

[8] https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html#:~:text=The%20median%20size%20of%20a,apartments%20and%203%2C000%20were%20townhouses.

[9] https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/#:~:text=The%20average%20house%20size%20in%20the%20UK%20is%20relatively%20small,2%20(1%2C948%20ft2).