Charles Murray is getting raked over the coals on twitter because he had the temerity to suggest that a young couple could have a nice life for themselves if they each worked 48 hours a week at the local Buc-ee's as they build their nest egg. Now, I certainly wouldn't want to put in those sort of hours at a convenience store but the option exists. Of course, twitter is full of types who find this repulsive but aren't comfortable saying why so they bring out the red herrings
I’m a European who has visited the US three times for a sum total of about six weeks.
I’m always astounded at how casually Americans spend rather than save.
My Lyft driver to Logan airport was 20-something guy from the DR and his other job was a flight attendant. He said it was like he’d found the cheat code to life.
48 hrs/wk at a name tag job is pretty sucky. To my observation the low end jobs skew part-time so they don't have to offer benefits.
I tell struggling acquaintances they really need to get some credentials to break thru the $20/hr ceiling. Basically it just sucks to have fungible skillsets.
Buc-Ees pays better that most other large truck stops, highway exit businesses. There is also a corporate ladder to get on at Buc-ees that is probably easier than the corporate ladder at Wal-Mart.
Buc-ee’s lowest starting pay is $18/hour. They provide medical, dental, and vision insurance. They have 401-k’s with company match up to 6%. They have PTO that rolls over if not used.
Oh, they also participate in E-Verify. I appreciate employers who have saved the starting rung of the employment/economic ladder for Americans, mostly youth.
For customers they have below average price gasoline, clean bathrooms, ok food to go, and 24 hour open. They sell lots of cheap nick-knacks but also quality outdoor gear and hunting goods and cooking equipment.
There’s a reason why their gas pumps are occupied and their parking lots are full. I gassed up at one north of Ft. Worth last week on my return from Kansas. I got a large coffee that was pretty good and gave me the caffeine fix I needed. Despite the late hour we felt safe.
As a teacher I have good days and bad but the one perk of the job is that I am literally never bored at work; there is always something to do. Now I admit it's not physical labor so it's not difficult per se but I am working from the time I set foot in the building until I leave
I can’t speak to Buc-ee’s in particular, but the convenience stores around me generally cap hours at 35/week so there’s no chance of overtime. There don’t seem to be many teenagers working those jobs either, mainly young adults with two part time jobs. The lower reaches of the working class is a terrible place to be.
One might want to look up Buc-ees. It is not a convenience store. It is more like a truck stop for cars. Buc-ees also post what they pay employees on their help wanted sign. They are more like Chick-Fil-A in that the starting pay in high for the industry.
Based on a quick Google, 12 - 13/100K. Suicide is 28/100K, highest of all groups. Steve should do a deep dive on suicide as well. It's higher in rural states. I'd guess at least half of them are old guys deciding to call it quits.
I can recall going on a business trip long ago with a top lawyer (his brother became a US Senator). I looked thru a newsweekly whose big feature that week was all the people in American who died of gunshots. I thought to myself, "I didn't know so many old guys shot themselves." On the way back, the lawyer read the same feature and then said to me, "I didn't know so many old guys shot themselves."
If it's old guys killing themselves because they are lonely, that's sad. If it's old guys with 3 months of agonizing cancer left to live, that seems like less of a social problem. But I don't know.
I'm old enough to remember Senator John East killing himself by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He had suffered from polio but was distraught that he was losing his mental faculties.
I knew four older guys who killed themselves. Three with terminal cancers and one whose wife had Alzheimer’s. He shot her and then himself. The young guys overdosing worry me a great deal more.
Not charting Indians throws off your glorious color-coding. You could have used purple or green for the total. I doubt we'll see Barney or Martian murders in our lifetimes.
NYC is now justly proud of its homicide total, below the national rate, but whatabout shoplifting, assaults, and other street/subway crime?
I don't think mugging is that big of a deal in New York like it was in the 1970s.
Subway violence isn't that common, but it's a form of terrorism in terms of the psychological torment it inflicts on people who are fairly claustrophobic about riding the subway anyway.
I grew up in upstate New York. My extended family still lived in the city. My cousins were so immured to violence that they just dyed their dark hair blond so they could keep making out with guys in cars when the Son of Sam killer was stalking tbe city.
Emotionally and intellectually, I still don't know how to react to that.
> Not charting Indians throws off your glorious color-coding. You could have used purple or green for the total. I doubt we'll see Barney or Martian murders in our lifetimes.<
Agree that perhaps saving red for when Steve has American Indian data would be good.
But I think Steve deserves good credit for always pushing for easily identifiable colors, while the elite media and government do everything possible to make the identifications confusing and random so that people can never easily grasp what's going on. Intentional obfuscation.
I'm stretched out here in a hotel room bed in Vernal UT (head back to the PNW) and I'd call my color a sort of pinkish hued cream (tanner and redder on arms and legs). Doesn't necessarily stand out again white background. So you gotta pick something for whites.
Agree maybe a purple could be the "all". Might be good to leave green for future use as Muslims.
I'm still trying to get attention for what I've branded "The American Slaughter" -- 150,000 dead young black males in the USA just since 1995. That's 5,000 dead black young men a year, at least, predominantly killed by other young black males, usually with handguns. It's an ongoing national tragedy that black leaders and important big media both don't seem to know about or are too chicken to raise it as an issue and address its causes and cures. https://clips.substack.com/p/american-slaughter-july-4th-edition
It’s interesting how eager the left is to embrace the idea that the homicide rate we have is somehow acceptable, since having a bit of knowledge about who contributes the most means being at peace with 7000 of your most treasured demographic killed every year, which is more than the other 87 percent of the country combined. If the black homicide rate was the norm for everyone we’d have the equivalent of all KIAs in the Vietnam War annually.
Anyway, I assume the decline is for the same reasons wars peter out - enough combatants have been killed that the pace couldn’t be sustained.
The trajectory is acceptable to them. I you compare our rates to EU rates they would tell you that obviously we need to outlaw guns (possibly assault rifles they would add without checking stats)
Obviously guns contribute to the ability of our least responsible and level headed citizens to inflict a lot of harm, but but thanks to our society being increasingly low trust anyone else would be crazy to submit to tighter restrictions on their availability for self defense. If big city prosecutors and judges imposed draconian sentences for having an illegal weapon or a switch it would help, but it seems to me that most Dems will do whatever they can to minimize punishment on blacks. The left loves to carp about "mass incarceration" but the reality is we don't have nearly enough.
One might say that Joe Biden did a fine job decreasing black murders as president. Perhaps it was because he appointed Kentangi Jackson to the Supreme Court which soothed the violent tendencies of black young men.
> Perhaps it was because [Biden] appointed Kentangi Jackson
Possible, but he had many excellent initiatives to reduce the black murder rate.
I think it's likely that would-be gunslingers were calmed when they learned that Biden was entrusting the nation's nuclear waste policy to that suitcase-borrowing autogynephile. "Gay rights are human rights!," they exclaimed to each other while holstering their six-shooters.
The important story is the immivasion--immavasion, immivasion, immivasion. Other stuff may be mildly interesting, but the immivasion simply dwarfs everything else.
-- The Parasite Party has gone all in--complete resistance--defending the right of illegals to invade America. And whatever the political fallout, it is working. Realistically Trump has no shot of sending back the 8 millionish invaders Mayorkas waved in. He's clamped down on the inflow--proving the "they can't be stopped" nonsense is nonsense. But nothing much is--or will--be done to toss out the invaders at the scale required. So its a step function--Parasites in power, invaders flood in. Quasi-conservatives in power the flow is mostly halted.
-- I read some story yesterday that the UK and France have agreed on one-out/one-in. For every channel jumping immivader caught and returned to France, the UK agrees to take a migrant. Seriously this is the "control" policy of Western Elites. Do any of them actually understand math? Or logic? Or they just hate their own peoples?
I give credit to Tucker Carlson for figuring this out and saying it out loud before most pundits (and me). We gave them credit for good intentions far too long.
I too am glad there is less murder and mayhem lately, but, as usual, Yglesias's Pollyannaism is unwarranted.
Just as we use a GDP deflator ("inflation") to correct GDP statistics so we can see the underlying value, we also need a Homicide Deflator to apply to homicide statistics so we can see the underlying level of social dysfunction, which is usually what people actually want to know when they look up homicide stats. One homicide today might be the moral/social equivalent of two homicides a couple of decades ago, when emergency response was slower and trauma surgery less capable, for example.
So when Yglesias says, "Hooray, we're approaching the lowest murder rate year on record," he's wrong, first of all because he's suffering from a bad case of present-tense-ism (murder rates were much lower before the Great Liberalization began in the 1960s), but second because even if we only look at the 21st century, a murder today is societally more significant than a murder ten or twenty years ago because society has taken more steps prevent or mitigate assaults since ten or twenty years ago.
Trauma care has improved steadily over the last few decades. More widespread car ownership and transport options made trips to the hospital faster. Ubiquitous cell phones have made emergency response faster. And ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cell net monitoring have almost certainly suppressed some crime that would formerly have occurred.
If we had data for non-fatal shootings, it would be possible to create a relatively objective Homicide Deflator by dividing fatal gunshot wounds by non-fatal gunshot wounds. Unfortunately, no dataset of non-fatal shootings exists in the US, AFAIK. Maybe one of the better run European countries has such data?
Most people want to know their chance of being murdered (or their children's) not necessarily using it as a proxy for social dysfunction. Secondarily they want to know murder stats so they can push gun control.
Gun control activists seem keen for gun control irrespective of the murder rate.
"Chance of being murdered" = social dysfunction.
Anyone who is inquiring about their chance of being killed is also implicitly interested in their chance of being maimed/mugged/inconvenienced. It's just that the homicide statistics are the most nearly objective and consistent yardstick for all those other things too.
So it's the crime stat analogue to the city couple looking for a suburban home, and asking the Realtor, "how are the schools here? Good, or very good? Exactly how good are they?" Everyone knows what they're really asking about, but all parties must speak in euphemisms.
Yes, now, but historically the push for gun control came after, and because of, the surge in gun crime/gun murder in northern cities (which came after, and because of, a great migration of southern blacks post WWII)
Yes, because it is now not legal to suppress black criminality qua black criminality, "gun control" is (or was) a proxy to suppress black criminality by other means. But it turned out black criminals don't much obey gun control laws either, so crime correlates with blackness rather than gun-control-ness.
Those who still push gun control do so primarily to accelerate the genocide of non-elite whites.
Think of the effect on GDP if none of these emergency room visits were necessary. A recent emergency room visit with one night spent in a hospital was billed at 18,000 for one of my kids.
Going by the life-expectancy, I am not sure that survival today is better than survival 2019. Unless they had a recent influx of Israeli trauma surgeons...
Right, there was a big jump in homicides since 2019.
The point was the homicide rate might have been even worse if, e.g., there hadn't been the battlefield experience of hundreds of trauma care workers disseminated through the nation from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
If there were a way to know, e.g, how many shots people fired into other people each year (irrespective of whether the victim died), it would be a purer measure of violence and social dysfunction, undistorted by changes in medical care, response time, or even marksmanship.
I wonder how the data would look like with a 2014 age-adjusted cohort? Because fertility is down, most race/ethnicity-defined cohorts should be aging. Which on balance would translate into reduced crime. The most crime passionate cohort is, I guess 15-29?
I hope you enjoyed your mini vacation 😊
O/T
Charles Murray is getting raked over the coals on twitter because he had the temerity to suggest that a young couple could have a nice life for themselves if they each worked 48 hours a week at the local Buc-ee's as they build their nest egg. Now, I certainly wouldn't want to put in those sort of hours at a convenience store but the option exists. Of course, twitter is full of types who find this repulsive but aren't comfortable saying why so they bring out the red herrings
https://x.com/charlesmurray/status/1941931632556143063
I’m a European who has visited the US three times for a sum total of about six weeks.
I’m always astounded at how casually Americans spend rather than save.
My Lyft driver to Logan airport was 20-something guy from the DR and his other job was a flight attendant. He said it was like he’d found the cheat code to life.
48 hrs/wk at a name tag job is pretty sucky. To my observation the low end jobs skew part-time so they don't have to offer benefits.
I tell struggling acquaintances they really need to get some credentials to break thru the $20/hr ceiling. Basically it just sucks to have fungible skillsets.
Buc-Ees pays better that most other large truck stops, highway exit businesses. There is also a corporate ladder to get on at Buc-ees that is probably easier than the corporate ladder at Wal-Mart.
Buc-ee’s lowest starting pay is $18/hour. They provide medical, dental, and vision insurance. They have 401-k’s with company match up to 6%. They have PTO that rolls over if not used.
Oh, they also participate in E-Verify. I appreciate employers who have saved the starting rung of the employment/economic ladder for Americans, mostly youth.
For customers they have below average price gasoline, clean bathrooms, ok food to go, and 24 hour open. They sell lots of cheap nick-knacks but also quality outdoor gear and hunting goods and cooking equipment.
There’s a reason why their gas pumps are occupied and their parking lots are full. I gassed up at one north of Ft. Worth last week on my return from Kansas. I got a large coffee that was pretty good and gave me the caffeine fix I needed. Despite the late hour we felt safe.
https://buc-ees.com/careers/
The worst time of any job I had was when there was nothing to do, and I've cleaned litter boxes and door mats (it was a two man, four cat office).
As a teacher I have good days and bad but the one perk of the job is that I am literally never bored at work; there is always something to do. Now I admit it's not physical labor so it's not difficult per se but I am working from the time I set foot in the building until I leave
I can’t speak to Buc-ee’s in particular, but the convenience stores around me generally cap hours at 35/week so there’s no chance of overtime. There don’t seem to be many teenagers working those jobs either, mainly young adults with two part time jobs. The lower reaches of the working class is a terrible place to be.
One might want to look up Buc-ees. It is not a convenience store. It is more like a truck stop for cars. Buc-ees also post what they pay employees on their help wanted sign. They are more like Chick-Fil-A in that the starting pay in high for the industry.
And a dangerous one now.
Do we know what the per 100K rate is for native Americans? Doesn’t move the needle on the overall rate but curious how it compares to black rates
Based on a quick Google, 12 - 13/100K. Suicide is 28/100K, highest of all groups. Steve should do a deep dive on suicide as well. It's higher in rural states. I'd guess at least half of them are old guys deciding to call it quits.
I saw it graphed on X yesterday, male vs. female, in age groups. Over 75 male was YUGE, several times the next worst bin.
I can recall going on a business trip long ago with a top lawyer (his brother became a US Senator). I looked thru a newsweekly whose big feature that week was all the people in American who died of gunshots. I thought to myself, "I didn't know so many old guys shot themselves." On the way back, the lawyer read the same feature and then said to me, "I didn't know so many old guys shot themselves."
If it's old guys killing themselves because they are lonely, that's sad. If it's old guys with 3 months of agonizing cancer left to live, that seems like less of a social problem. But I don't know.
I'm old enough to remember Senator John East killing himself by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He had suffered from polio but was distraught that he was losing his mental faculties.
I knew four older guys who killed themselves. Three with terminal cancers and one whose wife had Alzheimer’s. He shot her and then himself. The young guys overdosing worry me a great deal more.
For Googe AI.
Based on the provided information, male suicide rates in the U.S. vary by age group, with older men having the highest rates.
Key statistics (2022 data)
Highest rate: Men aged 75 and older had the highest suicide rate at 43.9 per 100,000 population.
Older Adults (55+): Suicide rates increased with age among men 55 and older in 2021.
Age 55-64: 26.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Age 65-74: 26.1 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Age 75-84: 38.2 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Age 85 and older: 55.7 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Younger Adults: Suicide rates for younger men (15-24 and 25-44) were lower than for older men but still significant.
Age 15-24: 23.8 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Age 25-44: 30.0 deaths per 100,000 population in 2021.
Adolescents: Rates are lowest among males aged 10-14, but increased between 1999 and 2017.
Age 10-14: 3.3 deaths per 100,000 population in 2017.
I find those age 15 - 44 rates horrifying.
Right. They are 60% of 85+.
Those are much higher than what I saw yesterday for <75. I don't recall the source.
Not charting Indians throws off your glorious color-coding. You could have used purple or green for the total. I doubt we'll see Barney or Martian murders in our lifetimes.
NYC is now justly proud of its homicide total, below the national rate, but whatabout shoplifting, assaults, and other street/subway crime?
I don't think mugging is that big of a deal in New York like it was in the 1970s.
Subway violence isn't that common, but it's a form of terrorism in terms of the psychological torment it inflicts on people who are fairly claustrophobic about riding the subway anyway.
I grew up in upstate New York. My extended family still lived in the city. My cousins were so immured to violence that they just dyed their dark hair blond so they could keep making out with guys in cars when the Son of Sam killer was stalking tbe city.
Emotionally and intellectually, I still don't know how to react to that.
> Not charting Indians throws off your glorious color-coding. You could have used purple or green for the total. I doubt we'll see Barney or Martian murders in our lifetimes.<
Agree that perhaps saving red for when Steve has American Indian data would be good.
But I think Steve deserves good credit for always pushing for easily identifiable colors, while the elite media and government do everything possible to make the identifications confusing and random so that people can never easily grasp what's going on. Intentional obfuscation.
I'm stretched out here in a hotel room bed in Vernal UT (head back to the PNW) and I'd call my color a sort of pinkish hued cream (tanner and redder on arms and legs). Doesn't necessarily stand out again white background. So you gotta pick something for whites.
Agree maybe a purple could be the "all". Might be good to leave green for future use as Muslims.
I'm still trying to get attention for what I've branded "The American Slaughter" -- 150,000 dead young black males in the USA just since 1995. That's 5,000 dead black young men a year, at least, predominantly killed by other young black males, usually with handguns. It's an ongoing national tragedy that black leaders and important big media both don't seem to know about or are too chicken to raise it as an issue and address its causes and cures. https://clips.substack.com/p/american-slaughter-july-4th-edition
I don't follow. Was the guy saying that government pays all his larger bills so that the Lyft/FA income was gravy?
It’s interesting how eager the left is to embrace the idea that the homicide rate we have is somehow acceptable, since having a bit of knowledge about who contributes the most means being at peace with 7000 of your most treasured demographic killed every year, which is more than the other 87 percent of the country combined. If the black homicide rate was the norm for everyone we’d have the equivalent of all KIAs in the Vietnam War annually.
Anyway, I assume the decline is for the same reasons wars peter out - enough combatants have been killed that the pace couldn’t be sustained.
The trajectory is acceptable to them. I you compare our rates to EU rates they would tell you that obviously we need to outlaw guns (possibly assault rifles they would add without checking stats)
Obviously guns contribute to the ability of our least responsible and level headed citizens to inflict a lot of harm, but but thanks to our society being increasingly low trust anyone else would be crazy to submit to tighter restrictions on their availability for self defense. If big city prosecutors and judges imposed draconian sentences for having an illegal weapon or a switch it would help, but it seems to me that most Dems will do whatever they can to minimize punishment on blacks. The left loves to carp about "mass incarceration" but the reality is we don't have nearly enough.
One might say that Joe Biden did a fine job decreasing black murders as president. Perhaps it was because he appointed Kentangi Jackson to the Supreme Court which soothed the violent tendencies of black young men.
Ha.
> Perhaps it was because [Biden] appointed Kentangi Jackson
Possible, but he had many excellent initiatives to reduce the black murder rate.
I think it's likely that would-be gunslingers were calmed when they learned that Biden was entrusting the nation's nuclear waste policy to that suitcase-borrowing autogynephile. "Gay rights are human rights!," they exclaimed to each other while holstering their six-shooters.
Ho hum return to the mediocre normal.
The important story is the immivasion--immavasion, immivasion, immivasion. Other stuff may be mildly interesting, but the immivasion simply dwarfs everything else.
-- The Parasite Party has gone all in--complete resistance--defending the right of illegals to invade America. And whatever the political fallout, it is working. Realistically Trump has no shot of sending back the 8 millionish invaders Mayorkas waved in. He's clamped down on the inflow--proving the "they can't be stopped" nonsense is nonsense. But nothing much is--or will--be done to toss out the invaders at the scale required. So its a step function--Parasites in power, invaders flood in. Quasi-conservatives in power the flow is mostly halted.
-- I read some story yesterday that the UK and France have agreed on one-out/one-in. For every channel jumping immivader caught and returned to France, the UK agrees to take a migrant. Seriously this is the "control" policy of Western Elites. Do any of them actually understand math? Or logic? Or they just hate their own peoples?
They hate their own peoples.
I give credit to Tucker Carlson for figuring this out and saying it out loud before most pundits (and me). We gave them credit for good intentions far too long.
I too am glad there is less murder and mayhem lately, but, as usual, Yglesias's Pollyannaism is unwarranted.
Just as we use a GDP deflator ("inflation") to correct GDP statistics so we can see the underlying value, we also need a Homicide Deflator to apply to homicide statistics so we can see the underlying level of social dysfunction, which is usually what people actually want to know when they look up homicide stats. One homicide today might be the moral/social equivalent of two homicides a couple of decades ago, when emergency response was slower and trauma surgery less capable, for example.
So when Yglesias says, "Hooray, we're approaching the lowest murder rate year on record," he's wrong, first of all because he's suffering from a bad case of present-tense-ism (murder rates were much lower before the Great Liberalization began in the 1960s), but second because even if we only look at the 21st century, a murder today is societally more significant than a murder ten or twenty years ago because society has taken more steps prevent or mitigate assaults since ten or twenty years ago.
Trauma care has improved steadily over the last few decades. More widespread car ownership and transport options made trips to the hospital faster. Ubiquitous cell phones have made emergency response faster. And ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cell net monitoring have almost certainly suppressed some crime that would formerly have occurred.
If we had data for non-fatal shootings, it would be possible to create a relatively objective Homicide Deflator by dividing fatal gunshot wounds by non-fatal gunshot wounds. Unfortunately, no dataset of non-fatal shootings exists in the US, AFAIK. Maybe one of the better run European countries has such data?
Most people want to know their chance of being murdered (or their children's) not necessarily using it as a proxy for social dysfunction. Secondarily they want to know murder stats so they can push gun control.
Gun control activists seem keen for gun control irrespective of the murder rate.
"Chance of being murdered" = social dysfunction.
Anyone who is inquiring about their chance of being killed is also implicitly interested in their chance of being maimed/mugged/inconvenienced. It's just that the homicide statistics are the most nearly objective and consistent yardstick for all those other things too.
So it's the crime stat analogue to the city couple looking for a suburban home, and asking the Realtor, "how are the schools here? Good, or very good? Exactly how good are they?" Everyone knows what they're really asking about, but all parties must speak in euphemisms.
Yes, now, but historically the push for gun control came after, and because of, the surge in gun crime/gun murder in northern cities (which came after, and because of, a great migration of southern blacks post WWII)
Yes, because it is now not legal to suppress black criminality qua black criminality, "gun control" is (or was) a proxy to suppress black criminality by other means. But it turned out black criminals don't much obey gun control laws either, so crime correlates with blackness rather than gun-control-ness.
Those who still push gun control do so primarily to accelerate the genocide of non-elite whites.
Think of the effect on GDP if none of these emergency room visits were necessary. A recent emergency room visit with one night spent in a hospital was billed at 18,000 for one of my kids.
This is a good example of why GDP (economic activity) is not synonymous with economic productivity.
Going by the life-expectancy, I am not sure that survival today is better than survival 2019. Unless they had a recent influx of Israeli trauma surgeons...
Right, there was a big jump in homicides since 2019.
The point was the homicide rate might have been even worse if, e.g., there hadn't been the battlefield experience of hundreds of trauma care workers disseminated through the nation from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
If there were a way to know, e.g, how many shots people fired into other people each year (irrespective of whether the victim died), it would be a purer measure of violence and social dysfunction, undistorted by changes in medical care, response time, or even marksmanship.
Asians pulled a NOPE and got out of dangerous areas really fast - how else can we explain this downward trend?
NYC public schools are 15% Asian and 15% white. What is the basis of believing that Asians have got out of dangerous areas?
I wonder how the data would look like with a 2014 age-adjusted cohort? Because fertility is down, most race/ethnicity-defined cohorts should be aging. Which on balance would translate into reduced crime. The most crime passionate cohort is, I guess 15-29?
Same thing for traffic accidents?