Lauchs

CBC/BBC/Al Jazeera, checking the Economist for my minute by minute bellweather county level fun.

I mean, it probably would've been ideal then but as usual, America was recovering from/embroiled in the last Conservative disasters (financial crisis, Afghanistan/Iraq.) And Obama had just burned a lot of political capital giving people healthcare.

Going as Mr Clean. Seems simple and fun. Although, with Halloween parties being what they are, we'll see how long those pristine whites last.

Again, there are people whose salary is $1 but they are multi millionaires/billionaires.

So, your measure would "show" people trying to live on $1 a year as that is their full time wage. But surely we both understand this would be a poor measure of what you're hoping to achieve?

Amd to answer OP's question, I've given a bunch of examples of people where measuring their full time wage would be a poor measure of their situation and equally, a poor measure of the economy.

Can you explain why you think the lowest, which is going to be full of outliers and silliness would be more meaningful than say, the median for the bottom 15 or 20%?

To me, any measure that could count Larry Ellison, Elon Musk or Meg Whitman, all of whom have at one point received $1 annual salary, as grievously poor seems silly and pretty poor indicator of the economy but maybe you understand something I don't?

First, full time wages isn't how median income is calculated. It's simply taxable income, could be from capital gains, inheritance, working part time etc.

If we switch to full time employee, are we ignoring shiftwork? Counting it as full time if they have enough hours? (Which really starts to skew when you think about the service industry where a bartender or server walks out with a few hundred for a few hours hard work.)

But let's just ignore all that, pretend everyone is on a 40 hour a week job. Even so, again at the low end you still run into oddities that really warp the statistics. When I was 16 - 21 I had a full time job as a camp counsellor but a large part of my wages were what's called "in kind" wherein they covered my food and board. When I was in school, I worked security and made minimum wage but with the understanding I could do my schoolwork (in essence, another type of in-kind pay) so I took that over a better paying job. Similarly, you might have apprentice or entry wages. Or as above, a program that gets special needs folks a job eith a willing employer where some of the wage is shared by the government or goes to paying the costs associated with employing that person. (Consider these programs from the employer's perspective, if the employer was paying the same wage regardless, why would they hire someone with challenges etc when they could hire someone who wouldn't require accomodations.) Again, all of this stuff happens at the very bottom and really isn't a good indicator of the economy.

If you did large bottom swathes, bottom 10/20 % you'd still have some of these issues but they'd get smoothed out a little bit.

The lowest are likely to have serious issues and not be particularly helpful (how well the paperboy, special needs cashier etc is not particularly representative or useful.)

We also have measures that capture most of what you're looking for there in the poverty rate.

What might be helpful is stuff like the interquartile ranges (think medians but more of them) or specific medians e.g., what's the median for the bottom twenty, bottom forty etc.

Measures at the extremes are rarely very helpful except for arguing in ignorance or bad faith.

Being on mushrooms convinced me to be a good person to the best of my ability.

Unfortunately I keep doing so in unpopular ways, like hating on sweatshop clothes which makes me less than ideal when people are earnestly talking Western social justice.

Bone conduction headphones for biking. Being able to listen to my tunes while I'm riding around is amazing.

I thinknOP got kicked out of somewhere and is unhappy about it.

Lieutenant Ellen Ripley.

I think you've got most of it pretty well outlined here. A couple minor additions/thoughts:

Lemmys communist leanings are probably self reinforcing. If you're a moderate/mainstream leftie but think communism is a but silly, well noting so will get you "yelled at" by those disproportionately loud voices. It gets tiring, so I imagine the mainstream/moderates learn to avoid communism adjacent threads/questions etc.

There also may be an age thing. I have less time and inclination to argue with randoms online than when I was younger. And when I was younger I had much more extreme (and in retrospect some embarrassing) views.