alienblue89

It’s way worse than that.

WAY worse.

Ticketmaster and Livenation are both owned by the parent company Liberty Media. In addition to TM and LN, Liberty also owns/absorbed Pandora, iHeartRadio, ClearChannel, and SiriusXM. So not only do they own and control almost ALL live music, but also virtually ALL terrestrial radio, literally ALL satellite radio, and even a bit of streaming.

And it gets worse. The controlling share of Liberty Media is owned by ONE old man. Which means this one dude: A. Decides what new music you can hear on the radio or satellite radio, B. Decides which music gets ads (via ClearChannel advertising and the massive chunk of podcasts iHeartRadio & Pandora control), C. Decides who is allowed to play in the bulk of live venues across the entire nation controlled by LiveNation, and D. Forces you to use Ticketmaster to not only buy face tickets, but also controls any resale tickets.

Basically from the very first time you hear a new band until you see them live, Liberty Media is controlling and profiting from every single step.

(And that’s just music. Liberty Media owns a whole slew of other stuff too).

rieh

Yep. Liberty Media also owns Formula One, MotoGP, Quint (which provides ticket sales for F1, the NBA, MotoGP, Kentucky Derby / other major horse races, a few major NFL teams, NASCAR, and the NHL among others.) They have racing, horse racing and sports tickets basically cornered.

They also own SiriusXM, the Atlanta Braves, Charter Communications (Spectrum), TripAdvisor, and Qurate Retail (QVC, HSN, and a few other retail businesses).

Greg Maffei, the president / CEO / chairman of these companies, used to be CFO at Oracle and Microsoft. He's on record as having donated around $200k to various right-wing organizations during the 2016 election cycle (250k in the '14 cycle and another $150k from 2018-2020, no data on the latest cycle).

Dude basically owns entertainment for a big chunk of Americans.

Edited to add clarification to Charter

• The gloves were expensive gloves that Nicole bought for OJ (& there was a receipt that proved he owned the exact same pair). Why does a guy who lives in LA need gloves? He traveled calling MNF games & needed them when he was in a cold climate. One bloody glove was found at the murder scene, the other one behind the guest house on OJ’s property.

• The shoeprints in blood at the scene were from expensive Italian dress shoes that OJ was photographed wearing at a football game (& they were the same size).

• Ron Goldman’s blood was in OJ’s Ford Bronco. Nicole had been in the car so her blood could have another reason for being there, but Ron Goldman’s blood had no other reason for being in there.

• OJ was on the record as having creeped around Nicole’s condo after dark, peeping in windows watching her with other men & then bringing it up to her later. This puts him on her property creeping around after dark on any random night (& the murders happened around 10pm).

• The murders also just happened to occur on a night where OJ had a late night flight to Chicago prescheduled (which could be seen as an attempt at setting up an alibi). Another odd coincidence.

• Nicole’s 1993 911 call is an interesting listen if you haven’t heard it before.. They’re arguing over the kids at one point because Nicole doesn’t want them to hear the fighting. OJ says “you didn’t give a *** about the kids when you were sucking his **** in the living room, they were here”*. This is a reference to OJ peeping in her windows at night & watching her perform a sex act on another man. OJ confronted Nicole & the man at a later date & reportedly asked the guy "so, was she any good at it?"

Everyone knew he did it, but because interracial relationships were more rare at the time, it tended to put black men in a negative light. OJ was ultra famous & became a poster boy for an entire group of people - fair or foul.

People didn’t like this, so they decided to grasp at straws & use misdirection to focus on something other than the evidence. Mark Fuhrman gave the perfect misdirection & reason for people who were uncomfortable with the black/white dynamic of the case to deny that it happened & acquit OJ.

DNA also didn’t carry the weight it does now back then. IIRC they had to have weeks of expert testimony to even explain to the jury what DNA is & why it’s the best evidence you can have from a crime scene (short of a video of the crime happening).

Another fun fact most people don’t know. Johnnie Cochran - who was propped up as a hero in the black community- was married to an African American woman & had a family with her, but he also had a white mistress & a child with her in a different city. He met her when he acted as an attorney on a case for her. This was back at a time where just having different women in different cities was a pretty easy way to keep the situation a secret.

Johnnie Cochran also had a history that included domestic violence accusations made against him by an ex-wife.

And top comment response:

/u/pmyourthongpanties: don't forget the case was fucked from the getgo when the police didn't fully document the chain of custody on evidence.

There is a famous Harvard Business Review case study that is commonly used for MBA classes on Operational and Process Design called Benihana of Tokyo. I'm sorry it's behind a paywall but here's the link https://store.hbr.org/product/benihana-of-tokyo/673057 and I will reference bits of it here.

Basically Hiroaki (Rocky) Aoki opened the first Benihana in 1964 and it was a huge success. Most of what you see today in American hibachi culture is a copy/evolution of that model. I think you need to understand the operational design of Benihana to understand why it was successful and why so many restaurants chose to copy it.

The case study and accompanying lessons typically focus on how restaurants are chaotic production systems... people come in mostly in a huge wave a dinner hour, different size tables, different length of stay / duration, wait staff relay customer communication to the chef for preparation, menus require dozens of dishes to be prepared to unique specifications, wastage is significant, margins are low, etc. It's a NIGHTMARE if you think about it as a production system that you need to solve for. But the design of a Benihana was brilliant in mitigating so many of these issues:

• Pacing: tables are for 8, require reservation, and you will not be sat until the chef is nearly ready (i.e. instead of when the table comes open from the prior guests). And when your meal is finished, the chef leaves, and the other guests you've been grouped with also start to leaving, creating the hint that you should move along too rather than occupying a large table for longer.
• Batching: tables are always for 8, groups of 2-4 will be combined into an 8-top. This makes every chef's preparation time at a table more consistent. They'll move through the same sequence of rice, veggies, proteins... regardless of what is ordered, chefs generally spend a predictable amount of time at each table. Also, if you are early (or your table simply isn't ready) you sit in the bar... being greeted by a sushi station and bar (extremely high margin). Don't forget how exotic sushi and an "umbrella drink" would have been in the 1960's. Even the drinks were high-margin: fruit juice mixed with rail-quality spirits, yet you can charge a fortune because it came in a coconut (again, you have to put yourself in the 1960-70's a bit as this is common today).
• Standardization of Product: when you break it all down... hibachi restaurants serve steak, chicken, and shrimp. Three simple proteins for the chef to get intimately familiar - helping to eliminate waste from incorrect cooking. They dress these up in different combinations, with different sauces and sides... but in the end you have three simple proteins that take just a few minutes to cook, all using the same surface. This also helps customers make their choices faster, while disguising the simplicity of the menu to your customer. Furthermore, restaurant managers buy in bulk... three proteins, rice, onions, eggs, zucchini, soy... that's 90% of your product purchase, in a few simple bulk items. And finally, such a short list allows inventory and stocking simplicity.
• No Kitchen: the kitchen is a prep space only, more room for seating and dining.
• Throughput: a simple menu, where you eliminate the in/out timing variability of clients arriving / seated time / departure, simple menu... it's a job shop. And don't forget there's less wastage when the chef can get immediate feedback on an item. No, I ordered shrimp or can I actually get that well-done? No wait staff middle-man who may delay or miss the customer request.
• American-friendly cuisine dressed up as exotic: it's steak, chicken, shrimp, rice, and American vegetables like onions and zucchini. Yet it feels like a trip to the Pacific, and can be priced as such. The chef cooks in front of you, an unheard of pleasure - and he's also the entertainment! This allows premium pricing, at basically no extra cost, for basically every-day ingredients that Americans already like and are familiar with and a chef you had on salary anyway.

Simply put, Benihana solved almost all the major issues of a traditional restaurant, making it highly profitable AND an exotic, popular destination for their clients. Of course successful restaurateurs would copy this model... and it's been simplified into fast-food and cook-at-home variations as the style remained popular for so long. But it all began with Rocky Aoki, possibly the most brilliant restaurant owner in history.

January 08, 2024

3 things:

• So much of China's rise is due to the U.S. outsourcing manufacturing jobs that supported our middle class. We're in the process of decoupling from the Chinese (although we'll probably never fully repatriate those jobs) and that's going to have a huge impact on the Chinese economy. Remember, Mexico just became the number 1 trading partner for the U.S, with China in steady decline.

• Much of China's recent economic growth has been driven by a massive over-investment in real estate that has created tremendous waste, with an estimated housing stock built for 3 billion people (China has 1.3 billion) and a ponzi-type scheme to fund that growth. China's housing market is collapsing as we speak and that will resonate for years (decades?).

• Finally, China is an authoritarian state that expends huge resources controlling its own people, requiring massive investments in people, process and technology. Democratic nations, like the United States, don't make these investments and are better able to deploy human and financial capital to for purposes of economic growth.

The "You need to shut the fuck up about Daryl Davis" thread

Greetings! You have been linked here because at some point, you gave a really shitty take on Daryl Davis by suggesting something along the lines of the idea that pacifism and dialogue are more effective tools in fighting racism than direct action, and using Davis as proof. This thread exists to explain why your take is so shitty.

To be clear, nobody thinks Daryl Davis has bad intents. But he does more harm than good. Let's look at a number of reasons why...

Daryl Davis isn't as effective at defrocking Klansmen as you think he is

Davis claims he defrocked 200 Klansmen. This has some truth to it but is misleading. Numerous individuals who left the Klan after conversations with Davis noted that they were already questioning their racist beliefs. Davis gave them a push over the edge - a good thing, for sure, but not remotely the revolutionary transformation that you're crediting him with.

In other instances, people who spoke to Davis left the Klan but remained active in racist politics. Or, in a few instances, Davis was just incorrect about them having left (whether he lied or was mistaken, I don't know). For example, Davis claimed that he convinced Richard Preston to leave, but Preston was arrested for firing a gun at Charlottesville. He has claimed that he "dismantled the entire KKK in Maryland," but the KKK is active in Maryland.

Side note: Davis posted Preston's bail. If Davis were an anti-incarceration activist, noting that the carcereal state targets certain groups, that would be praiseworthy. But I know of no examples of Davis posting the bail of any young black man targeted by the white supremacist police. Instead, he got an actively violent racist out of jail. That's who he chose to bail out and put back in society. This is what you call an anti-racist activist?

Which leads into the next point...

Davis looks at racism as an individual problem, not a systemic one

All the great civil rights activists understood that racism wasn't simply a matter of opinions amongst individuals, but structural power issues. To quote Stokely Carmichael:

“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”

There's nothing wrong with changing individual minds - it's a noble task - but it isn't a means of dismantling systems.

Punching racists treats fascism and racism as political, not interpersonal, problems, as it seeks to minimize the presence of racial politics in society by breaking up rallies and the like. Of course, it is not anti-capitalist activism in its entirety, but nobody claims it is. Real anti-racism requires we look at systemic racism, and neither Davis, nor you, have done this.

Besides ... 200 racists (if even that many) since 1983? Great, but hate group membership is skyrocketing, and to try to take these groups apart piece-by-piece, and not in more direct manners, is a waste of time and energy that people targeted by hate groups just can't afford. And that's especially problematic because...

Your reasoning puts the burden of anti-racism on the shoulders of its victims

Let's start by quoting Malcolm X:

"I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people."

You are asking people who literally just want to exist to bear the burden of changing society, and not the people who commit or advocate for atrocious acts. Why do you have this condescending pacifist tone towards us, and not the Nazis themselves?

Davis has been physically attacked more than once when interacting with Klansmen. He's willing to risk his physical safety, and good and well if he chooses to, but why should anyone have to? Why do we have to bear the violence of people who want to commit it against us just for existing, instead of defending ourselves? Why should we have to put ourselves in danger in the search for an end to that danger?

Further, Davis himself has noted that his privilege in other areas has aided in his task: He said, “Sure, you’re in some uncomfortable environments with people who may not like you or share your views or who think you’re inferior to them because of the color of your skin — or that you have a smaller brain than they do, you’re prone to crime and welfare and selling drugs. You name the stereotype, I’ve heard it. But I know who I am. I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never sold drugs. I’ve never been on welfare. I have more education than most of them put together.”

Does that mean that black folks who have criminal records, or are on welfare, cannot achieve his ends? Because to me, it sounds like Davis is only successful because he conforms to white expectations of black behavior. Forced assimilation is racist. Black people shouldn't have to meet white racist standards in order to have the right to exist. This, again, puts the burden on the oppressed: Sure, you can be accepted in our society; just behave like us!

In conclusion...

Davis is really just the Klan's token black friend. He enables racists to look reasonable and gaslight the rest of us by suggesting that maybe if we were nicer to the racists, they wouldn't be racists - even though never in history has a white supremacist uprising been quelled without violence. There's no appreciable evidence that he's meaningfully converted anyone, despite all his robes, and he has actively aided the well-being of those who would kill the rest of us. The Nazi Party had "honorary Aryans" - Jews who weren't so bad - and they used these individuals to legitimize their movement by suggesting that, hey, even Jews support the Nazis when those Jews are civilized enough! Davis fits that mold precisely. And by promoting him, you're promoting the idea that we have to risk our lives to serve your pacifist morals. Screw that.

Friday January 26, 2024

Just a reminder that the border "crisis" is a fake crisis manufactured by Republicans - A) immigration is way down from previous decades, including hitting a low not seen since the previous century in the last few years, B) most illegal immigration does not occur via the border, and C) the common metric pointed to is mostly repeats/the same people being counted multiple times as border enforcement is 20 times what the US had a few decades ago:

1. Immigration in recent years is nowhere near record highs. Net immigration 2022-2023 was 1.1M. During the 1990s it was ~2M/yr, and in many other years it was higher than now too (1950-2022 absolute numbers, see my first link for newer data released last month). And those are absolute numbers, so with the US population now 2.3x what it was in 1950, immigration rates now are correspondingly 2.3x lower.
2. In recent years the US saw its lowest number of immigrants in ~a third of a century: "A shortfall in immigration has become an economic problem for America - The real crisis is not border crossings but a shortage of new arrivals" (The Economist). During that period that US had its lowest immigration levels in ~a third of a century, Fox News ran huge numbers of pieces claiming that there was a border "crisis".
3. Decade after decade, border enforcement has increased by many multiples. Previous enforcement benchmarks have been met, yet enforcement continues to grow.
4. As we have increased border enforcement by many multiples, what is a record now is how many people we are "encountering" - but most of those "encounters" are actually (duplicate) people being counted more than once as they were "encountered" repeatedly. In actuality the number of repeats is even higher / the number of unique people is even lower than the official stats because if the same people are encountered 1 or more years since last time they are counted as unique people not a repeat.
5. As an analogy, if a government increased their budget for stop-and-frisk or speed traps by 20x, should people be surprised, or call it a crisis, if far more frisking or pulling over for speeding subsequently occurs?
6. Edit: Most illegal immigrantion does not occur via the border, but instead from people who flew in and did not leave when their visa expired, and it's been that way for many years - thanks u/Coldbeam
7. However, some people have been:
   1. Conflating the number of "encounters" at the border (even though most encounters are repeats with the same person being counted multiple times) with the actual number of immigrants.
   2. Conflating or falsely claiming that those legally following the asylum application process are an illegal or unauthorized immigrant.
   3. Pointing to the large number of times we caught/turned away people at the border and simultaneously trying to claim that the US has open borders and no enforcement, or using the broad term "immigrants" when they are really referring to "encounters" and include the same people counted multiple times, etc.
8. The other record is the backlog of immigration court cases, partially or largely due to underfunding over quite a few years (and consequently the number of people legally in the US while they wait on their case). Properly funding immigration courts would go a long way to clearing the backlog, and then allowing those whose applications are rejected to be expelled, but Republicans have fought against this as they feel it's better for them if there is a record backlog. Source.
9. Each year the population of illegal immigrants can go up or down, such as from some arriving and others leaving. The number of illegal immigrants peaked around the end of George W. Bush's presidency and the most recent number of illegal immigrants is lower - and again, these are absolute figures so as the US has grown over the decades, the illegal immigrant share of the population would be correspondingly lower https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
10. Even including immigration, US population growth last year (0.49%) was around the lowest in the last one or two centuries. With a "rapidly aging" US population and slowing US birth rate, immigrants will be more important to keeping America going, including that the US birth rate has fallen to 1.7, "which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is required for the U.S. population not to shrink without increases in immigration."
11. The states with the highest rates of immigrants are California, New Jersey, New York.
12. In just over 1 year, hundreds of thousands -- more than 10% of the nation's entire annual net immigrant total -- was bused to or otherwise arrived in New York City which is the city with the highest density in the US, and one of the highest cost of living in the US, and which has a "unique right to shelter” law requiring the local government to provide shelter to those who don't have it, including the hundreds of thousands who have been sent or arrived in NYC between 2022 and 2023. (In comparison, no city in Texas is even in the top 100 densest US cities.) Are people surprised that sending massive numbers of immigrants to areas that are already the most crowded in America, and with some of the highest housing costs in the US, would cause overcrowding?
13. The state with the most illegal immigrants is California.
14. Some have also raised concerns over immigrants bringing crime, but immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans -- more immigrants lowers crime rates.
15. If interested as well, a map of which countries have the highest rates of immigrants - the US is #39 globally.
16. The right's focus on immigration is not something that has only been since the 2020 election; for example, Trump implied most immigrants were bad people and said he wanted to build a wall since his 2016 campaign.

If someone wants to say "Even though the actual number of immigrants to the US is far below what the US accommodated historically, after increasing border enforcement by many multiples we are catching/turning away more immigrants," I would agree with that statement.

Do I think many, many aspects of the US needs to be re-analyzed in terms of "What can we learn from other successful developed nations"? Absolutely. But I think we too often get caught up in "That's what makes America unique" even if objectively we see that many other countries achieved better outcomes for citizens by doing the opposite of the US.

I've tried to include source links above to many statistics, but if anyone has other specific immigration stats they found helpful, I'd love to see them; unfortunately too often in recent years it seems like the numbers in most discussions are just around "encounters" (or court backlogs, which again, properly funding would go a long way to solving).

Putting this here because it's the top comment. I'm an Optical Engineer in the Automotive sector. I design headlights and taillights. If you're in the US you may be familiar with my work on the latest version of the Ford Expedition headlamp. So AMA but I'll give a rundown of what's up with those bright headlights below.

Alright so to start out with, there ARE requirements for maximum brightness. In the US it is regulated by a set of regulations called FMVSS 108. Canada's CMVSS 108 is nearly identical and there's a different but similar set of regulations in the EU. Almost all countries reference or copy one of these. But in any case, there are strict rules about what you can and cannot do. We'll just talk about the US though because our headlamp design tends have more glare for oncoming cars.

Right, so long story short when we measure these lamps we map out how bright they are based on the angle from directly forward, called HV. for oncoming traffic the important points are a 2 lines starting 1.5° left of center and continuing out to 90° left. One is at 0.5° up and the other is 1° up. The limits for them are 1000, and 700 candela respectively.

Firstly, these points have actually gotten DIMMER in the last few years, particularly the 6 or 7 since IIHS started rating headlamps. Overall the lamps are MUCH brighter but LEDs allow for substantially better control. So 20 years ago your Low beam would be maybe 15 m wide and light your lane 80-90 m. The latest requests from OEMs are 30 m wide and 130m range. Meanwhile the glare has been getting lower and lower. 20 years ago you would often see glare at 0.5° up of 700+ candela, maybe 500 in a really good system. Now I'd expect more like 200.

So if lamps are objectively better what's the problem? Color and Size. You see, the regulations were all written for halogen bulbs which all burn at ~3000K, a nice warm white. They also have a pretty hard limit on how bright they can be and still have a decent lifetime. All this means that to put 500 lumens on the road and hit the required candela values you knew how big a lamp was going to be. Unfortunately our eyes don't care about lumens or candela, they care about candela per square meter. This means that if that if in two identical systems, both putting out the same candela values if one is half the size, out eye will interpret it as 4 times as bright. This is REALLY easy to see in changes from old 7 inch rounds to even older 80 mm projectors. The same or lower candela values out of a much smaller area. Think of it as a big drain pipe and a power washer having the same gallons per minute flow but one is a gentle flow, the other will take your skin off.

Second issue is color. All the units I've mentioned, candela, lumens, etc acount for color and the sensitivity of your eye. BUT what they don't account for is pupil response. Basically, when you see bright light, your pupil constricts so you aren't blinded. But the pupil response for equal amounts of blue and red light are quire different, the blue is much slower. So, in comes HID and LED lamps which often sit around 5000K, closer to true white. But they aren't the SAME white as a bulb at that color would do. A white LED is just a blue LED with a yellow phosphor over it. The phosphor absorbs some blue light and emits yellow. These are balanced to trick your eye into seeing white but there's VERY little red content. I read a paper stating that the red content for an white LED the same color as a bulb is often less than 10%, for the more bluish end of the allowed values it's even worse. So what happens is you get hit in the eye with this light and instead of immediately constricting, your pupil stay much more dialated allowing more light in and glaring.

These are known issues and there ARE people working to resolve them but regulations are slow to change, especially with so many stakeholders involved. Anyhow, yeah AMA.

What destroyed the American dream of owning a home?

/u/cambeiu

The normalization and then growth of the global economy in the last 60 years.

Boomers just had a super good time for a couple of decades because of circumstances that we can't repeat and many people in the US really struggle to wrap their heads around this notion.

Hey, I get it. A large and affluent middle class is the cornerstone of the American dream. A dream in which anyone with a high school diploma and hard work should easily afford a nice house in the suburbs, 2 cars and a nice vacation with the family to a cool place once a year. Americans assume that this is the way the universe should work. That things were always like this, and that Americans have the "God given right" of the American dream.

However, this reality of a exceptionally wealthy and prosperous middle class by global standards is NOT the norm or the natural way of things, but a by product of a very unique and relatively recent set of historical circumstances, specifically, the end of World War II. At the end of the second world war, the US was the only major industrial power left with its industry and infrastructure unscathed. This gave the US a dramatic economic advantage over the rest of the world, as all other nations had to buy pretty much everything they needed from the US, and use their cheap natural resources as a form of payment.

After the end of world War II, pretty anywhere in the world, if you needed tools, machines, vehicles, capital goods, aircraft, etc...you had little choice but to "buy American". So money flowed from all over the world into American businesses.

But the the owners of those businesses had to negotiate labor deals with the American relatively small and highly skilled workforce. And since the owners of capital had no one else they could hire to men the factories, many concessions had to be given to the labor unions. This allowed for the phenomenal growth and prosperity of the US middle class we saw in the 50s and 60s: White picket fence houses in the suburbs, with 2 large family cars parked in front was the norm for anyone who worked hard in the many factories and businesses that dotted the American landscape back then.

However, over time, the other industrial powers rebuild themselves and started to compete with the US. German and Japanese cars, Belgian and British steel, Dutch electronics and French tools started to enter the world market and compete with American companies for market share. Not only that, but countries like Brazil, South Africa, India, China, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, South Korea and more also became industrialized. This meant that they were no longer selling their natural resources cheaply in exchange for US made industrial goods. Quite the contrary, they themselves started to bid against the US for natural resources to fuel their own industries. And more importantly, the US work force no longer was the only one qualified to work on modern factories and to have proficiency over modern industrial processes. An Australian airline needs a new commercial jet? Brazilian EMBRAER and European Airbus can offer you products as good as anything made in the US. Need power tools or a pickup truck? You can buy American, but you can also buy South Korean, Indian or Turkish.

This meant that the US middle class could no longer easily outbid pretty much everyone else for natural resources, and the owners of the capital and means of production no longer were "held hostage" by this small and highly skilled workforce. Many other countries now had an industrial base that rivals or surpasses that of the US. And they had their own middle classes that are bidding against the US middle class for those limited natural resources. And manufacturers now could engage in global wage arbitrage, by moving production to a country with cheaper labor, which killed all the bargaining power of the unions.

If everyone in the world lived and consumed like what the average American sees as a reasonable middle class lifestyle (i.e. drive an F-150 or an SUV, families with multiple cars, living in a house in the suburbs, high meat consumption, etc...), it would take 4.1 Earths to provide enough resources to sustain that lifestyle. But we don't have 4.1 Earths, we have just one. And unlike before, the USA no longer can outbid the rest of the world for those limited resources.

GRAPH: The U.S. Share of the Global Economy Over Time

That is where the decline of the US middle class is coming from. There are no political solutions for it, as no one, not even Trump's protectionism or the Democrat's Unions, can put the globalization genie back into a bottle. It is the way it is. Any politician who claims to be able to restore "the good old days" is lying. So yes, the old middle class lifestyle of big house, big car, all you can eat buffet, shop until you drop while golfing on green grass fields located in the middle of the desert is not coming back no matter what your politician on either side of the isle promised you.

We are going back to the normal, where the US middle class is not that different from the middle classes from the rest of the world. Like a return to what middle class expectations are elsewhere, including the likes of Europe, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia. Their cars are smaller. They don't change cars as often. The whole family might share a single car. Some families don't even own a car and rely on public transportation instead. Their homes are smaller. They don't eat as much meat and their food portions are smaller.

They are not starving. They are not living like peasants. But their standard of living is lower than what we in the US have considered a "middle class" lifestyle since the end of World War II.

Now, that is not to say that there isn't a lot of inequality in the US or to deny that policies are needed to address that inequality. But my issue with most of the "give us equality" folks in the US is that they imagine the rich being taxed so that they can finally afford that house in the burbs and the F-150 in the driveway like their parents were able to. That is NOT going to happen for the reasons I've already explained. No amount of taxation and public policy will make that happen. That version of the middle class is never coming back. Where I see public policy for wealth redistribution having an active and effective role is making healthcare more affordable, making the cities more walkable and livable so that young Americans can transition from the suburbs to smaller and more affordable homes in dense urban neighborhoods where cars are not a basic necessity to earn income. Our middle class will become more like other countries' middle classes. That cannot be changed. What we can aim for is having our social services and social safety nets more in line to what exits and is available for the middle classes of those other countries.