Bargain Center: discussion, gossip, etc.

[Hans25]

Hey numanoid geekmodel sold his copy of aalto for 49 $ , i think it s'cheaper than the website price.

And that was because I asked him to with respect to the sale

[Numanoid]

Can't you ask him to price it at $25, then I'll buy for sure

[hivkorn]

25 $ would be a 'INSANE NO BRAIN DEAL'...

[Hans25]

However what these numbers are basicly doing, is summing the national value of good and services produced in a year, and dividing that number by the number of people, which induces into a gross bias in terms of income distribution inequality. For instance in the last Wikipedia graph, Chile appears with a relative (to the rest of the world) high income, whereas sadly more than 80% of the Chileans are far, far below that line; that number over represents the income of a few companies and families an averages it to the total country population.

Average Income pr. capita doesn't say anything about the distribution of the income, but actually the median does and that was what he (the guy who initially linked to the different country incomes) refered to. If you use the median instead of the average you take care of outliers like for example the richest man in Chile that definitely would raise the average income but not be useful for anyone but himself.

Using the median is using the 50th percentile. If there was a hypothetical country with 100 inhabitants and the first 80 people had an income of $10.000 each year but the last 20 had $100.000 then the median would be $10.000 because guy number 50 had an income of $10.000. You can think of it this way: If a countries inhabitants were sorted after their income with the lowest first then the median is that person whos income is exactly a tiny bit higher than half of the population with a lower income than he has.
To measure inequality you normally use the Gini Coefficient that shows something about a countries income distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient However I don't like this measure because it's relative. If everybody has an income of $1 then there would be a total equal distribution. But if half of the population has an income of $1.000.000 and the rest has $10.000.000 then the Gini coefficient would conclude that they had a big inequality even though everyone is better off than in the first example.
But I know that it's not like South America is the most equal continent on earth. We are much more lucky here in Scandinavia than chilens are. A lot the problems also come from corruption in poorer countries.

[Hans25]

Can't you ask him to price it at $25, then I'll buy for sure

Don't you think that I have help you enough for this weekend?
I think he has to a fee of $10 or something. So unless he is Santa I'm not sure you are going to make him give you that offer.

[Hans25]

holy sh*t, i should've migrated to northern europe a few years ago guess i now have to become hindu and hope i'll be born again as a Scandinavian student

I haven't met one single US citizen that wasn't amazed by this when finding out . But if you heard about our legal system and the length of criminal penalties then you would probably faint.

[MrFurious]

Actually it's mostly the other way around. US salaries are higher than Europe salaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income.

Edit: And note the figures are before taxes, so the US having significantly lower taxes will probably take them all the way to the top for buying power.

That's incorrect. The median household income purchasing power from the link is EXACTLY adjusted and cleaned for price differences between the countries. So what you are linking to is just a confirmation of my statement. The real income (where price differences are talken into account) between the median US household and an average western EU-contry is roughly the same.

You are talking about how the figures in the table were calculated, which I agree with exactly so I don't see how can call me incorrect. I was the one who posted the link.
I was talking about how the taxes were not taken into account, which is what I interpret the highlighted sentence in the following text to mean.
Quoted from the article:

"The figures are in international dollars using purchasing power parity and are based on responses from at least 2,000 adults in each country, with the data aggregated from 2006 to 2012. Below is a list of the top 30 countries. The figures are before deduction of taxes and social contributions and not adjusted for household size."

[Hans25]

You are talking about how the figures in the table were calculated, which I agree with exactly so I don't see how can call me incorrect. I was the one who posted the link.
I was talking about how the taxes were not taken into account, which is what I interpret the highlighted sentence in the following text to mean.
Quoted from the article:

"The figures are in international dollars using purchasing power parity and are based on responses from at least 2,000 adults in each country, with the data aggregated from 2006 to 2012. Below is a list of the top 30 countries. The figures are before deduction of taxes and social contributions and not adjusted for household size.

Because what you wrote is simply not correct. When you measure real purchasing power you NEVER ever include other things like tax because you simply wouldn't be able to present things as simple as in that Wikipedia article.

And the reason for not including tax in that measure from the article is that if you did you would have to consider all kinds of other things and divide the population in a whole other way.

You cannot only isolate the lower taxes payed in US because US citizens in general have to pay for goods and services that are free in EU countries because of higher taxes. In Scandinavia most healthcare is free where as in US you have to pay insurance or else you will be busted if something happens. US citizens have to pay for higher education themselves and social benefits and welfare are a minimum compared to many western EU-countries.

So you can't just reason that because they have lower taxes they have a higher purchasing power for goods like music gear and software. NO they don't because they have much more expenses than people in many EU countries.

[mutantdog]

What is the difference between Aalto CM and Aalto, except that Aalto CM is monophonic.

The main difference is the monophonic thing. However, AaltoCM is based on v1.3, whereas the full version is now on 1.6. Since then the sequencer has been improved (1.3 version is buggy in some hosts), its resizable and the preset system has changed and expanded. No doubt many other under-the-hood improvements too. I went from CM to full and don't regret it.

[MrFurious]

You are talking about how the figures in the table were calculated, which I agree with exactly so I don't see how can call me incorrect. I was the one who posted the link.
I was talking about how the taxes were not taken into account, which is what I interpret the highlighted sentence in the following text to mean.
Quoted from the article:

"The figures are in international dollars using purchasing power parity and are based on responses from at least 2,000 adults in each country, with the data aggregated from 2006 to 2012. Below is a list of the top 30 countries. The figures are before deduction of taxes and social contributions and not adjusted for household size.

Because what you wrote is simply not correct. When you measure real purchasing power you NEVER ever include other things like tax because you simply wouldn't be able to present things as simple as in that Wikipedia article.

And the reason for not including tax in that measure from the article is that if you did you would have to consider all kinds of other things and divide the population in a whole other way.

You cannot only isolate the lower taxes payed in US because US citizens in general have to pay for goods and services that are free in EU countries because of higher taxes. In Scandinavia most healthcare is free where as in US you have to pay insurance or else you will be busted if something happens. US citizens have to pay for higher education themselves and social benefits and welfare are a minimum compared to many western EU-countries.

So you can't just reason that because they have lower taxes they have a higher purchasing power for goods like music gear and software. NO they don't because they have much more expenses than people in many EU countries.

Unless you have any sources with hard figures for your speculation then you are only guessing. Thats just how it is. You may be right or I may be right

[VitaminD]

Any word on a Call to Arms charity auction this year?

[Hans25]

Unless you have any sources with hard figures for your speculation then you are only guessing. Thats just how it is. You may be right or I may be right

You are not stupid are you? I can accept that you didn't think through what you said, but being ignorant is just a stupid way of trying not to lose face. What I told you is common sense. Any layman can understand this when he gets it explained. It's not rocket science. The only thing I would get out of spending more time by linking to different pages and presenting things in a nutshell would be that you just would ignore it.

[ksandvik]

Could we get back to Bargain Center: discussion, gossip, etc discussions, thx?

[homestudiomusician]

When did this turn into an economics forum??

[Fleer]

Some days ago. Quite interesting.