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If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

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Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#601

Post by Aurornis »

davesque wrote: post #411
cvoss wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Ar…

Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did…

> Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs?

Because those city centers have remained the same size while demand for living there continues to increase

More demand for a fixed set of land drives prices up.

Those city centers today are not equivalent to the same city centers 35 year ago.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#602

Post by wak90 »

mancerayder wrote: post #325
mannanj wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't deserve that, at least I don't feel like I do. I don't identify with "hard-working sheep" and everyone else, I identify with setting an example around transparency, honesty and dignity. There's a famous post about dignity written by someone who said something along the lines of "We have allowed being in the worker class in American become inherently undignified" and I think its more along that line: the very…

I have much of your perspective already and trust me, I propagandize it in person. At the same time like everyone else here I need jobs to pay the bills, and in every job I'm faced with these workaholic types who believe "this is not a 9 to 5 job" is a great motto. You'll find many of these people here, too. I try to be too useful to fire. But when I was younger places I worked at had brutal on-call situations and li…

Lol I have 18 right now and that's after years of having none

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#603

Post by littlexsparkee »

oooyay wrote: post #369
cvoss wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Ar…

I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my fa…

Ditto water infrastructure - failures and lack of ability to maintain/upgrade.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#604

Post by tensor »

Taikonerd wrote: post #107

The article is smarter than the title makes it sound. He's not seriously proposing that being rich makes you happy. And he notes that there's a big drop around 2020 specifically , which long-term trends don't explain. Just to state the obvious: 2020 was the year of COVID, which played hell with peoples' social lives. And I think it's been pretty well-proven that happiness is largely driven by the strength and quality…

Actually it's extremely well documented in science studies that money absolutely makes you happy up to a certain point. Basically if you don't have a home and food due to not enough funds, then yes money absolutely equals happiness.

Inequality has grown to the point where the majority of younger people now have no hope of ever owning a home, and even large parts of the country are struggling with something as basic as food.

The HN crowd lives in a top 5% bubble and often forgets how bad it is for most people. All this talk of "money doesn't make happiness" is terrible. Money for basic necessities is the problem here.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#605

Post by eloisant »

fl4regun wrote: post #20
functionmouse wrote: post #2

because America's not rich; like 100 people here just have more money than most countries

there's over 20 million millionaires in the USA, that's like, what, 1 in 20?

"Millionnaire" is meaningless.

There is a huge difference between someone with a net worth of 1M (owns a small home, still needs to work for a living) and a net worth of 30M (can get more than 1M per year of capital revenue without working).

And I'm not even talking about billionaires.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#606

Post by GS523523 »

eloisant wrote: post #582
JeremyNT wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lives much closer to family (intentional choice) Living close to family is surely the single thing most could do to immediately improve their happiness. (while not all of us are lucky to have welcoming family, the way people in the US are willing to uproot themselves and move across the country where they know nobody is extremely harmful to their senses of community)

It's also something that has nothing to do with religion. I am always surprised to see how religion people sometimes think you can't care about other people or your family if you don't believe in a bearded guy in the sky.

The difference is, like Jesus taught, religious people will care for others expecting nothing in return (reward is from God), but secular people will, even if it's as small as the narcissistic satisfaction of "look at me I'm such a good person." As soon as the cost-benefit of caring for family goes deeply negative, there's no reason to keep doing so.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#607

Post by nobody9999 »

bjourne wrote: post #302
ecshafer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would probably be less efficient to have a more complicated waffle machine with a dispenser attached that costs more. Having a re-usable glass or metal cup, would require cleaning, and waffle batter is kind of annoying clean. Instead you buy a big ole sleeve of paper cups that are used one time and cost $.01 each. It is more efficient than paying someone making $20/hr to spend 5 minutes a day scrubbing it.

The obvious solution is to reuse the same plastic cup for all customers each morning. Voila, now you save 309 plastic cups/day.

>The obvious solution is to reuse the same plastic cup for all customers each morning. Voila, now you save 309 plastic cups/day.

Mysophobes[0] are quite common in the US, so multiple people touching the same cup wouldn't fly here.

That's why many folks won't take mints from a dish at restaurant cashier stations if they're not individually wrapped. Many folks take an extra paper towel in public bathrooms to use on the door handle as they exit.

And on and on.

The US is, mostly, a center-right to far-right country. And as many studies have shown, there's a correlation between higher "disgust sensitivity" and right-leaning folks.

Isaac Asimov drew that distinction pretty starkly in comparing (robot stories and later Foundation follow ons) "Spacers" to "Settlers".

[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22436-mysopho...

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#608

Post by zingababba »

decimalenough wrote: post #545
redleggedfrog wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you. Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social…

YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.

If your company culture fully supports it it's great. Unfortunately because of all the half-assed RTO the employees still remote often feel both resentment from employees that had to RTO and anxiety about being first in line to get cut.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#609

Post by sidewndr46 »

tzs wrote: post #454
tim333 wrote: post #305

As an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted. On my trip…

In constant dollars cars are actually pretty much the same as they were 40+ years ago when you compare similar types and trim levels. A new Honda Civic for example costs about the same when you take into account inflation as the Civic I bought in 1989. The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger per…

You've got the cause and effect backwards here. The average purchase price of a car in constant dollars is about double now because those are the only cars to purchase and the only group that can afford those cars are those who are affluent. In general the people who purchase new vehicles ironically are not the ones who own them. They consistently purchase new vehicles at a regular cadence.

The existence of some base model Honda Civic or similar doesn't imply you or anyone can actually buy one.

Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

#610

Post by FeteCommuniste »

decimalenough wrote: post #555
pepperoni_pizza wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN comments are sadly mostly just people pushing their favorite thing, whether COVID denialism, "everything is going bad because people are atheists" or whatever, without engaging with the article at all.

> COVID denialism > "everything is going bad because people are atheists" I don't think I have ever seen anybody express either of these opinions on HN, and if they tried, they would immediately get downvoted to oblivion.

Here's one example of the second, in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877926
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