The hype around Disco and the resulting backlash were so intense that people lost sight of what actually happened. Discotheques were a cultural trend that started in the 60's and went big in the 70's, and it was an international phenomenon that included Europe and Latin America before it spread into the US.
If you watch Saturday Night Fever and pay attention, you will notice that people tend to forget what the movie was actually about: A group of Italian American teenagers living in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn in the late 70's who used the then-vibrant Disco scene as an escape from their otherwise problematic lives. It's a pretty messed-up movie.
And Disco didn't die, it just evolved into the 1980's club scene. When Michael Jackson worked with Quincy Jones to make Off The Wall, he pointed the way for an entire decade that was still in the future.
The answer is in the comments at the posted link, and is exactly what I thought -- the funding that makes the service possible is designed to help people with hearing disabilities, they don't want to pay additional for others to use the service who don't need it.
> It's common for the relay agent to use their human intelligence to navigate a phone menu or get the right party on the line, to rephrase and clarify, since typing is so slow.
I'd be tempted to use such a service simply for having someone else deal with phone menus and similar bullshit at the other end of the call.
Just as others have pointed out that cut-and-paste was a term around a long time before this reference, so too was WYSIWYG. The Dramatics had a top popular song in 1971[0] using the same phrase as its title (albeit spelled slightly differently).
I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented" the term "desktop", or "folder".
"Cut and paste" was of course a term used with paper before computers, but arguably the computer version of it is not quite the same, because you have that hidden buffer ("clipboard") and can usually paste the same cut item multiple times. Adapting the physical-world cut-and-paste process to the computer realm can count as an invention.
>why can't you hire help out of pre-tax income, like any other business can
Leaving aside the obvious fact that your personal activities are not a business[0], you can indeed hire help out of pre-tax income -- in the U.S. no one pays income tax on their gross income, only their taxable income. By the time common tax credits are factored in, a married couple with children may easily have $30-40K of gross income each year not subject to income tax.
Many, if not most, homeowners do not need to go out and work extra hours to pay someone to do work to repair their property, any more than they need to work extra hours to pay for food and clothing, so looking only at the marginal tax rate is misleading (as in the example above of earning an extra $167 to have $100 after tax).
Further, work you pay for that improves the property (as opposed to repairs) is added to the tax basis of the property, reducing future taxable income when the property is sold. Along with the potential to exclude up to $250K/$500K (single/married) of gain[1] from selling the property is a huge source of pre-tax income.
[0]and even businesses can only deduct expenses for people they hire for services that are related to generating a profit.
The decision to work extra in order to pay to outsource a task vs doing it yourself (as was framed above) is exactly the type of economic decision where the full marginal tax rate applies.
I specifically am turned off by the superlatives aspect of the questions, as in "what is the best..." or "what is the most...". It immediately leads me to think about what metric is being used to measure it, since my "best" or "most" something may not be yours, and so I can't really answer, and instead would go off on a tangent about the meta aspect of the question.
So, if you are going to ask me about something, just ask without forcing me to rank things against some undefined scale.
I too was hoping for something about the 25-cents-per-play video arcades, I was partial to Xevious and Gravitar. (Which are still available in one form or another, either on PC or Playstation). Except, I was already not a kid at the time, late 1970s to mid 1980s peak game arcade experience. Maybe the title should include "games their grandparents love".
Acknowledging that security and convenience are inversely proportional I like the products from this company, they specialize in cash/bank/legal document protection bags that are easy to use without taking additional effort.
A locking briefcase (a cylinder key lock with 7 pins? - not sure of the correct terminology here)) may not stop an expert locksmith, but otherwise you can tell if the contents have been accessed. I have a fabric one (heavy duty fabric, cannot be torn by hand) with a zipper that is locked by key. I keep my notebook computer in it when I travel, either in the trunk of my car or my hotel room.
Or, when I took a multi-day train trip a few years ago, every time I had to leave my "roomette" (open access) and travel a few train cars away for a meal or sightseeing, I made sure the laptop was in the locked briefcase.
>It's hard (even for successful, intelligent people) to wrap their head around the fact that their $1m house that ballooned up to $2m over the last 25 years has in fact, lost value.
Anything to back that up? I spent some time searching online and every source strongly disagrees with your assessment of house prices vs. inflation. And the tax argument also fails here, since two people who own a home can exclude half a million realized gain from tax altogether, or leave it entirely tax free to heirs.
Not saying a home isn't a good investment. But on average, home prices have risen 4% y.o.y. in the US. Inflation target is 2% but is much closer to 4%. If you sell your house for $1m more than you bought it for, you can exclude 500K from capital gains, but you're still paying cap gains on the other 500K.
Bottom line: assume a 1% real profit y.o.y. on your home, then factor in closing costs (8%), and. then cap. gains on the profit. You didn't make as much as you think.
> they may try really hard to hold onto that money by saving and buying appreciating assets.[...] their real wealth was only increasing by a modest 30K per year.
Not to mention the initial $1M increase, which you conveniently did not. And that's $30K/year they did not have to work for and that they would not have otherwise, so what's disappointing about that?
You can avoid a lot of needless drama by simply stating that the real rate of return, after inflation, would be about 4%/year.
And your tax argument is weak. Just as the parents left tax-free money to them, they too can leave tax free money to heirs simply by dying. There is no need to pay any capital gains taxes while they are still alive, if they simply leave the money invested. Even if they need some of it for expenses, the tax hit is much, much lower if withdrawn in smaller annual amounts than in one giant lump sum after ten years.
I don't understand your argument? You seem to be implying that if heirs don't withdraw any money then they will stay rich? Yes.
The point I was making is that most heirs might not fully understand tax implications, inflation, and that increases in nominal wealth != increases in real wealth. This all leads to generational wealth dying out, as well as for reasons mentioned by others in the thread.
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