American here:

About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

And this will get worse.

Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.

Fellow autist here, here’s my funniest Elon moment:

The cybertruck reveal, softball pitch into the window.

Musk audibly gasps and says ‘O-oh myfuckinggod.’

Comedy gold.

That moment, right there, that was the high water mark.

Then, the window cracks, and shortly afterward, his entire general public facade and reputation begin to crack and shattet as well.

I do appreciate a visual metaphor.

Well, the ‘listening to their constituents’ thing certainly hasn’t been going well lately… what with all the screaming matches, arrests, barely contained open revolts and what not.

They just kinda said those were all fake news and then stopped doing them.

I get that.

What… would actually make much more sense would be to index the minimum wage to some other, per state metric.

A fraction of median income, some formula that actually does a good job of estimating a minimum standard of living…

But, that will never happen, because … well basically half of voters and half state legislatures fundamentally either do not understand how to, or believe in laying a foundational safety net layer for society.

The income and CoL disparities within the US are… basically as wild as the differences between EU member states, but our governance systems are… well, pretty much fundamentally broken at this point.

More than that would create private business deserts in poor areas, forcing the locals to exclusively patronize corporations. More of the population would need social program assistance to help pay for the increased cost of our domestic food supply.

… If we’re talking about Arkansas… all of that has already happened.

You know Walmart is… from, and based in Arkansas, right?

20 ish % of the population is already below the poverty line… and the poverty line is basically ‘lets assume you have no rent and are homeless and just want to be able to buy food’.

That means 20% of the state is already getting SSI, SNAP, TANF, etc.

…

The US Federal poverty line is about $35 dollars a day. about $13k a year.

If you converted that to a full time wage, thats about $6.75 an hour.

The US Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

50 cents of difference.

Hasn’t changed since 2009.

From 2009 to 2025, if you go by CPI, a single 2009 dollar is worth about $1.50 2025 dollars, that is to say, prices have risen by 50% in 16 years.

…

Arkansas is literally an economic disaster zone.

41% of the state struggles with getting their basic needs met, multiple independent observers and international aid agencies have compared the level of poverty, lack of education, access to healthcare… to areas of the world recently devastated by wars.

You say the cost of living is 36-37k.

That must be for a single person.

As of Nov 24, the median individual income in Arkansas is $29,740.

That makes the median wage about $15.50 an hour.

The median individual income in Arkansas cannot afford the average cost of living for a single person.

Arkansas is already the state equivalent of a mentally unsound person being deemed incompitent to make their own decisions and be declared a ward of the state.

Bumping up the min wage would be more like doubling the care and support staff for the assisted living facility that is Arkansas, already massively dependent on Federal subsidies to the poor… and the laughably tiny tax rates on giant megacorps that allow said megacorps to dominate its economy.

…

If you want to see what unchecked hypercapitalism looks like, you’re looking at Arkansas.

Median one bed apartment rent, across the entire US, is $1550 as of Feb 2025.

Lets knock 20% of that off, to approximate a median studio apartment instead, give some leeway to poorer parts of the country.

(there are not as good or reliable general stats counted for studio apartments, but a studio being 20% less than a one bed is… hopefully a reasonable, napkin math aporoximation)

Ok, that’s $1240.

Alright, now we use the ‘rent should be 30% of your income’ rule.

Thats $4135 a month, rounded up very slightly to the nearest 5.

Ok, 40 hours a week, roughly 4 weeks a month = 160 hours.

4135 / 160 = $25.85, again rounded up to the closet 5 cents for simplicity, so thats your actual minimum ‘living wage’.

If you wanna say a studio should be 30% off a one bedroom?

Math works out to roughly $22.60

If you wanna say an actual one bedroom should be the standard, works out to about $32.60

Any way you look at this, $17 an hour is too low, that’s still… you can’t even afford a studio (as in, you cannot pass the rent to income threshold without a cosigner or double deposit or somethingnon your lease) you need roommates, you’re still living with your parents.

Ok whew, we are truly almost back to the 1890’s, Trumpublicans apparently favored era of America.

19th Ammendment was passed back in… 1920.

Basically this undoes women’s suffrage, so married women either just can’t vote, or will face massive uneccesarry hurdles voting.

And of course transfolk as well, they’re now pretty much formerly formally (ducking autocorrect) disenfranchised.

I wonder, do we have bootleggers (smugglers) for abortifacients, birth control, horomone therapy drugs yet?

I guess that’ll be the ‘growth market’.

It doesn’t come off as snarky at all, no worries!

Genuienly… Like, I myself am autistic, and I’m willing to bet a whole lot of other data scientist type technical data sets type careerists either are as well, or are close.

What I’m trying to say is: It is genuienly difficult to be both well versed enough in the math and data… and at the same time have the requisite communication skills to present a whole lot of complex data in a way that people with less expertise can understand easily… while also at the same time not over generalizing so much that you are actually giving a just flat out false description or misleading metaphor.

I appreciate your summary of what I wrote in the last post.

It is not a measure of public sentiment.

That’d be like a consumer confidence measure, something that just polls the general public.

The fear and greed index is based off of technical measurements of various active markets.

Very broadly, it is telling you whether or not the financial class, investors, stock traders, corporations significantly involved in that, your 401k managers… are acting fearful or greedy.

A middling score close to 50 basically represents ‘reasonable, stable growth’.

Extreme fear means market participants are acting like a significant stock/bond downturn either is occuring or about to occur.

Extreme greed means market participants are acting like a huge upswing in stocks and bonds are occuring and will be maintained in the future.

You’re right that extreme greed isn’t a good thing, as it usually means a whole bunch of irresponsible financial bets are being made, that will later pop, and crash.

At the same time, extreme fear is also bad… because it basically is that crash occuring.

Maybe think of it kind of like some value you get back from your blood work.

There’s a generally accepted ‘average’ value that means you are stable, healthy.

Then, there is a range of higher and lower values that are… relatively normal, within reasonable, expected variations.

Then, there are extreme values, way outside the acceptable range, either way too high or way to low, and now its time for your doctor to start looking at treatment options.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fear-and-greed-index.asp

The Fear & Greed Index is not just some bullshit chart, with arbitrary values, it is an index of 7 different indicators, all based on real data, all indexed together, that is to say, blended by a another formula that determines how much weight to give to each of the 7 constituent indicators.

It is presented as a speedometer… because 95% of people’s eyes glaze over when they see complicated but very technically information dense graphs and graphics.

I have a decade of work experience in data analysis and reporting, making things like quarterly and annual reports for a department or entire corp or non profit, making realtime views that update based on realtime or regularly reported data…

You have to dumb things down and simplify things … and often present data in a narrative structure, as a story, even for C Suite, upper management, the Board… because they almost always have a very low attention span.

I cannot tell you the number of times a younger, brighter eyed, bushier tailed me was… fairly politely and earnestly told by VPs or Board members that… its clear that I have a broad and deep understanding of statistics and data… but you’ve got to dumb these reports down to the point someone with a hangover can understand the most important information in 30 seconds.

Only other data nerds, stats nerds and accounting tend to possess the actual ability to read more complex charts without their eyes glazing over.

This speedometer presentation by CNN is pretty much the same logic used in good UI or video game design:

If some complex measurement is important and should be easily understood by the user at a glance, present that info in a simplified way that makes use of a visual metaphor or motif is rooted in something most people would have tangible experience with.

They are presenting this for the average American reader.

The average American has the literacy level of a 5th or 6th grader.

Also, it would be innacurate to describe this index as just measuring volatility.

Volatility is a component of the measurement, but there are many other components as well… that is what an indexed metric is, a single overall ‘score’ produced by combining a bunch of indicators according to a set formula for how to do that.

pats head

‘Confused by’, son, the phrase you’re looking for is ‘confused by’. Maybe ‘taunted by’?

I can only hope I live long enough to see a ‘The Death of Stalin’ type movie about the Trump admin.

Ah yes, 1950, when America was the only massively industrialized nation in the world that hadn’t been bombed into fucking oblivion during WW2, and therefore dominated the global economy by default.

They made the economy bad by spending too much money toward Ukraine.

… or something.

Anyway, time to occupy Gaza, invade Panama, buyout Greenland, maybe invade Canada, ramp up strikes on the Houthis, and leak the group chat planning said strikes…

oh, and goad China into an an unprecedented trade war, as they are doing full scale drills/mock invasions of Taiwan.

But its fine because Trump will end the Ukraine war on day one and is therefore the peace candidate.

… I swear to god I’d have to be beaten in the head with hammers and develop CTE to be operating on the same mental wavelength as Trump scrotum suckers.

… yeah.

Shits gonna get real bad.

Like Great Depression 2.0 bad, but this time shanty towns are all classed as illegal homeless encampments and Trump has publicly stated multiple times his plan for the homeless is literally concentration camps in the middle of nowhere or outskirts of cities, that kind of bad.

… Meanwhile, the bond markets are continuing to freak the fuck out, and the yield curve has now inverted and univerted three times before an actual ‘official’ recession has begun.

For those that don’t know, a yield curve inversion is when short term bonds offer a higher yield (interest rate) than long term bonds.

That… it not how that is supposed to work.

Generally speaking, a longer term bond should be riskier due to the amount of things that can possibly go wrong in that longer amount of time, as compared to a shorter term bond that pays itself back in less time, with less time for unforseen nonsense to happen.

Every single US official recession in the last … 50, 100 years? has occured after first, the yield curve inverts, then it uninverts, and then an ‘official’ recession follows quite rapidly.

…Except fucking now.

Now we are in a situation where the yield curve has inverted then uninverted three fucking times without an ‘official’ recession actually starting.

This is unprecedented.

As of right now, the 6 month T Bill and the 5 year T Bond have roughly the same yield, and everything in between has a lower yield, the lowest point being the 2 yr.

… Its supposed to be basically a line going upward on the y axis of yields, as you move rightward on the x axis from shorter to longer term debt/bonds.

The bond market right now is more or less saying we are gonna be in for 2 years minimum of economic decline.

Exactly.

He’s not insane until rich dude’s yacht money and 401ks start tanking.

Before that diagnosable criteria, he doesn’t meet the DSM V threshold for magalomanical genocidal fascist.

‘Results inconclusive’

EDIT ‘magalomaniacal’ was a typo, but it fits, so it stays. Hopefully it’ll be in thr DSM 6.