Love the TriStar. Another plane with beautiful proportions. I later learned to like the DC-10, but the TriStar was just better.

Another wall of text with tone-deaf bootstrapping advice that doesn’t actually address any of the questions I’ve posed to you.

Economists disagree. And there’s an unspoken assumption in your model: that the system preserves the distribution of wealth. But we know that to be false, because the distribution of wealth has changed over time.

Happy to hear your circumstances have improved; sounds like you were in a bad place before. Sending positive vibes so things keep getting better.

I’m surprised we haven’t yet heard that houses would be affordable if people would just stop buying new smartphones and fancy cars.

The market doesn’t care what conditions it subjects workers to. So those basic economics put people who accept those low-wage jobs with long commutes at a significant disadvantage that cannot be overcome. Jobs with no healthcare. Jobs they’ll lose if they’re ever late. Jobs they can’t get to by public transportation.…

No, I’m not. So that straw man is out.

You’ve argued more than once against the minimum wage being increased to support a family. Do you advocate some other external source of resources by which the minimum wage worker can support a family? Explain how this works. Look more than one step beyond your pat statements and see where they lead.

An area that has a lot of highly skilled trades or professions still needs products and services provided locally. If you require that everyone who supports those highly skilled workers lives far away, but they’re only paid for the time they’re at work, you’re effectively paying them even less, and consuming…

“Higher pay involves cost to someone along the line.” That’s zero-sum game thinking. So much for awareness of economic realities.

If the purpose of the minimum wage is to provide the basic necessities for that one person and explicitly not to support a family, then its purpose is eugenic and evil — especially if it was created in the 50s, when women were expected to be homemakers and you were expected to get married, settle down, and have…

Absolutes don’t work. Deflecting criticism of the effects of the self-perpetuating accumulation of wealth and power in the US by saying there is no better system is disingenuous or foolhardy, depending on where you peg it on the malice-incompetence spectrum. This is not about a singular choice between…

I’m a big believer in not letting personal achievements blind me to economic realities.

Which way does it work? If I consider myself a world citizen, does your job leave the country?

You write “but we live in a capitalistic economy” as if it’s either an immutable fact or the best of all possible worlds.

The problem (which Walmart had no small part in creating) is that if Walmart doesn’t offer the cheapest Chinese-made product, Target and Home Depot and Costco and Amazon still will.

Well, you know, it’s a lot easier to divide the additional money ten ways than ten thousand ways.

If you’re jealous of what Union workers have, maybe the problem isn’t that they have a Union, but rather that you don’t. Or maybe the problem is that neither of you have a government that acts as if the needs of the many outweigh the greed of the few.

You’re right, “made in America” isn’t very useful. The label needs to be smarter. It’s not perfect, but consider a label that indicates % domestic content and the % of other content by country for any country with at least 10%.

But your job will never leave the country, right?