Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
I live in a home built after 2000 that had aluminum wires run to its heat pump. A few years back coolant leak from the heat pump lead to huge electric usage before the aluminum wiring lit on fire and shorted itself out. Since repaired, but was told at the time original installer didn't correctly do the aluminum grease on the exposed wire parts.
That said I think the wiring there is still thick aluminum.
Not sure I really have a point - all things equal I'd prefer copper, but it seems like aluminum can be fine when done right too - just riskier when done to the quick and dirty homebuilder standard.
Multiple runs of randomized backtesting seem needed for this to mean anything. It's also not clear to me how there's any kind of information update loop. Maybe I didn't read closely enough.
So WB buys/merges w/ discovery to break it back off as part of a merger. Seems sort of silly. Curious if this means pretty much all WB/Disc/HBO content will end up on Netflix.
FWIW a lot of the disability disclosure instructions for statistical purposes say stuff like "ever had cancer" and other qualifications that I find curious (because they don't really seems to be truly indicative of having a disability or not). (Not that it has anything to do with the main point of the article. Even in K12 a certain type of affluent family makes services into a game.)
So if you think that the poverty line should be delineating that income below which a household is subject to major systemic risks and has no clear path to retirement, it does appear that the poverty line as currently defined is wildly inaccurate.
If you rule of thumb just looking at $2k/mo housing and $2k/mo for health insurance for four, it implies that a living wage for such a household is some number well above $60k, and potentially as high as $105k w/ my napkin math. This, IMO, suggests that there is a level of accuracy to the article, even if the $140k it suggests is high.
I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.
Yeah the author makes a classic mistake of over arguing the point (potentially because the article was AI generated).
Laser focusing on housing and childcare would have been enough to make the point. Throw healthcare in and it's a solid argument. Get into the weeds on individual expenses and you open yourself up to a lot of nitpicking, which is all over this comment thread
He also way overshoots the target. I absolutely believe the current poverty line is way to low, but trying to argue it should be $140,000 a year is insanity. A lot of people will disregard the overall point of the article just due to that claim alone.
I mean it's worth noting that it seems to be for a family of four. I do feel pretty confident that if you take the poverty line as being a measure of the income below which a household has major systemic risks, saying that it probably should have been something like $80k in 2020, and that if you adjust it, then concluding it being $100k+ doesn't shock me.
It's not rocket science to see that just $2k/mo on housing and $2k/mo for healthcare for four people adds up to $48k, and that means more than $60k pre-tax income is an insufficient total compensation.
Cheap phones like a year old Moto G are under $100. There's no reason that shouldn't last two years. They do everything necessary. If you're near poverty, you don't get to use "normal" amounts of data, streaming shows and Spotify and YouTube. You need enough data to get by, and 5GB will easily load every website you must access in a month, never mind that the plan includes all the talk/text you need.
I really do pay $15 a month for my phone plan. I've never hit my 5GB data cap.
I do have $30 home internet. So even if we assume two adults and home broadband, we're talking $70 including hardware, not $200, but there's nothing I do on my home WiFi that I absolutely need and couldn't do from my phone while staying under the data cap. But I'm not financially struggling, and it's an expense I'm happy to pay. It's not something I need.
I also use cheap Mint Mobile plan with a 5 gig plan. Most months I don't hit the cap. But the months that I do all have two things in common: either traveling, often with the implicit assumption that I can use my phone for work, or tethering to use for work when there's a power or internet outage. Those primary causes aside, the current online universe does an awful lot of video and I've wasted an awful lot of data watching tutorial videos and how-to type stuff.
That said, the point is that if you can't watch a tutorial because it'd run over your data cap, it's problematic. So is having too trash of a phone - it's the kind of thing employers will see as a negative signal at a certain point.
Which is to say, sure, maybe you can spend under $200/mo on phones and Internet for one or two people, but realistically you're not spending under $100 without major and problematic sacrifices. And whether it's a $100 or $200, compared to housing, food, other stuff, it's not a wild expense.
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