That shows wealth can go up without people feeling better, if most gains come from assets then it mainly helps those who already have those assets while others mostly see higher costs
If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#832Earlier 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…
Yup, you are correct to not generalize, because Austin is one of the cheapest "cities" in America.
Not for a while, prices have gone way up here.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#833As 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…
Austin prices absolutely exploded from about 2010 to 2022. A huge part of that was housing, and then just before the pandemic Austin became sort of a weird "meme stock" ("Elon Musk is moving there!", "Joe Rogan is moving there") where its popular vision far outstripped its actual reality. I remember travelling around 2018 or so and telling people I was from Austin, and nearly every time I got a "Oh cool, I've heard t…
>so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.
Commercial property and property tax rates are insane in Texas. It's not the pay, because in towns were pay is less prices aren't much lower.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#834Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might use oat milk as a proxy for ultra-processed food. I used to live next door to a farm and I know how milking works - don’t ask me to milk an oat, though.
At least oats don't have to be perpetually kept pregnant while taking their offspring away from their mothers. See, snide comments cut both ways.
I see someone has no idea how farming actually works.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#835This discussion skips any consideration of the underlying premise that "self-reported happiness" is always significant Populations in different countries often have very different pyschologies and societal customs, including propensity or reluctance to be outspoken, to express "feelings", to complain, etc. Populations may differ in how they respond to questions about "happiness" For example, a country with relatively…
how would you measure "happiness" if you were tasked to do so for a study?
Well, for one...if Ireland and Finland come out on top, you are doing it wrong. That should have been your first clue that the "study" is clearly doing something wrong. Also, if you don't know how easy it is to game a study...well then you have never conducted a study.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#836I wonder if the 'English language speakers saw the biggest increases in unhappiness' is related to something else I keep reading about, which is that countries like Russia are spending huge amounts of money on campaigns to decrease stability in the west. If they are making a concerted effort to drive the narrative in English speaking online communities, it would make sense that English speakers would be most affected…
I've been suspicious of this. It's typical for mainstream social media to become negative because that's where legitimately unhappy people go to complain, but things like Reddit and Twitter seem completely bot-farmed on top of that. And more and more people have been online, especially starting 2020. Even seems like Trump or his close contacts are browsing Reddit comments.
Look farther afield. For example, remember that brief "war" between India and Pakistan last year? Right after it ended, a couple of populations of bots appeared on X. One group of bots spammed anti-Muslim propaganda. Another group of bots spammed anti-Indian propaganda. We know this because when there were Internet outages later last year (in that part of the world), whole groups of accounts went silent at once.
Basically, there are foreign propaganda bot farms who don't propagandize their own populations, but instead focus on the US population. Generally trying to get Americans to turn on their (the people running the bot farms) enemies. Sometimes those enemies are countries, other times they are immigrant populations. Funtimes huh...
PS Yea, I know Israel does it, so does HAMAS and a bunch of other countries including both Russia and China.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#837Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#838Something discussed in the article, but absent in the diagnosis of the final paragraph: the unique phenomenon of Donald Trump in American life. To half the country (including me), he's the worst leader in the country's history. Even if a person has faith in humanity, they may still feel like they are swimming against the man's personal tide of anger and bad judgement. Things might be great if it weren't for the disas…
If Trump changed his name to Andrew, he wouldn't even be in the top 2 worst Presidents named Andrew. If you don't know history, you think everything is happening for the first time ever. You have probably never seen something truly unique happen in your lifetime but you don't know that because you don't know history.
PS There was once a major political party in the US literally called the "Know Nothings" and that name wasn't ironic.
Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#839Re: If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
#840Something discussed in the article, but absent in the diagnosis of the final paragraph: the unique phenomenon of Donald Trump in American life. To half the country (including me), he's the worst leader in the country's history. Even if a person has faith in humanity, they may still feel like they are swimming against the man's personal tide of anger and bad judgement. Things might be great if it weren't for the disas…
If Trump changed his name to Andrew, he wouldn't even be in the top 2 worst Presidents named Andrew. If you don't know history, you think everything is happening for the first time ever. You have probably never seen something truly unique happen in your lifetime but you don't know that because you don't know history. PS There was once a major political party in the US literally called the "Know Nothings" and that nam…
> There was once a major political party in the US literally called the "Know Nothings"
In the exact same sense as there is currently a major political party in the US literally called the "MAGA party".
ie. not literally and not actually, just colloquially.