Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
I don't think you can draw any conclusion about the economic health of the entire population from a small number of cherry-picked cases so egregious that a YouTuber deemed entertaining enough to turn them into monetized videos.
I can tell you about the people around me making below median income and still raising families, but it would not be interesting enough for YouTube.
Youtube is entertainment designed to get clicks, and the algorithm enhances biases. Fox news hosts would likely be youtubers if they started their careers today.
A great example of what seems to be the current ethos for the generation (I realize Handey isn't of this generation). Very much "nothing matters as we'll all die anyway, who cares about what comes after". I don't fault the sentiment, to be clear, it's just an indication of the socio-economic situation that fostered it.
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
> I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out".
However bad their odds are gambling it's often the case that it's still the best chance they'll ever have to meaningfully improve their standard of living.
A lot of it is simply the rising price of housing and stagnating wages meaning that for a lot of people, the "chipping away" path their parents took toward home ownership is never going to bear fruit. Gambling and grifts of one kind or another are seen as the only alternative.
It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported.
I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed.
This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group.
There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
Unfortunately there is hypocrisy to go around. Here's the argument China and India will use: "coal and fossil fuel always was for all its history and still is the largest portion of Germany's energy mix. It's hardly in a position to ask other countries to stop."
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
They won't prosper in China which has the biggest car market and better cars, that also happen to be cheaper. In the US, the second largest car market, they reduced their market in half. In Europe their sales are shrinking even as total EV sales increase. In India and Brazil, also in the top 6 largest car markets, their cars are too expensive so they sell a few *dozen* cars per year.
Even if they tried to be a car company with correct valuation they'd have nothing to offer to most of the market.
But at one time they sold the majority in what many saw as a disruptive new replacement for what those other companies did.
They were poised like Apple which sold relatively few iPhones in the first few years compared to the other companies, all of which are gone now. But Tesla squandered that advantage.
I think it's fair to say they tried using SQLite but apparently had to bail out. Their use case is a distributed DBaaS with local-first semantics, they started out with SQLite and only now seem to be pivoting to "SQLite-compatible".
Building off of that into a SQLite-compatible DB doesn't seem to me as trying to piggyback on the brand. They have no other option as their product was SQLite to begin with.
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