To follow up with this… they have a stupid video on their page where they break down expenditure of a girl in Houston who makes 65k. Insurance and rent takes half. Food is minimal at $271

$3/lb for boneless antibiotic free chicken breasts here in Massachusetts. https://www.shopmarketbasket.com/sites/default/files/weekly-flyer/pdfs/2024-05/mb-flyer-May5-May11-2024_web.pdf

42% are in school or are unemployed. 28% are working part time.

Yeah, food is the only real expense when you’re at home or in a dorm and not paying those student loans yet.

Considering only 30% of the people in this survey from ages 18-34 are working full time, i’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t an accurate representation of independent young adults.

26% are in school and 16% are unemployed for a total of 42% not really making money / are using loans for housing or are living at home.

28% are working part time and are unlikely to be living on their own - it’s rare to find a part time gig that can afford housing.

So 22% think housing is the highest cost issue… and only 30% are employed full time… sounds about right to me! I’m guessing it’s not 30% because those 8% got mortgages during the 4% or lower interest rate era.

Man… they use a metric of $2.57/day in 2023 dollars to define the level of extreme poverty? That’s $938.05 a year. Just wow.

Huge qol improvements in india https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXTZVKYYyig

PPP falls apart when you consider the price of consumer electronics, electricity, gasoline, airfare…

In the Dominican Republic you can’t get completely stable electricity. It just doesn’t happen without generators/batteries. Generators aren’t suddenly cheaper in DR. It’s 20DOP for 1kwh of electricity in DR, or $0.34 USD/kwh. I pay less in the greater Boston area. Wages there are way, WAY below 30k/year. The thought of having air conditioning at home is practically impossible for almost all who live there.

I love how you nitpicked the chile reference (with no counterpoint whatsoever) but it’s true across Latin America. Imported goods to poorer nations generally cost way above and beyond what the US pays…unless it’s prescription drugs because almost all other nations negotiate those prices to be much, much less than what the US pays (and only just started negotiating… for JUST Medicare.) I’m sure there are other examples as well. The PPP is so far apart on imports it’s insane. Often times things are sold in the US even if they are made locally because the price in the US is way above and beyond what the locals can afford.

The real rich

What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.

In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.

If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.

When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.

There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.

I can pretty much guarantee illegals don’t get worker protections so the law saying one thing or another really doesn’t matter.

Businesses can ignore most laws by default until someone sues them. This just removes the lawsuit for this specific thing. Work or die is the law.

My second paragraph is basically: I have no faith in humanity coming out of all of it. I don’t think humanity as a whole has any chance of changing course because of how humans just are.

Maybe we’ll have runaway greenhouse gas causing catastrophic climate change. Maybe we’ll blow everybody up in what some might call world war 3. Maybe we’ll just have more and more humans be born until Earth can’t support practically any non-human, non-livestock life. Maybe we’ll have a biological outbreak that actually causes extremely high mortality rates. Maybe we’ll have a CME hit and wipe out all electronics on the majority of the developed world. There’s so many things that are more likely to happen than the majority of humanity changing course.

We can’t even stop two pointless wars or fix American politics. There’s no way humans can solve a global problem that requires believing in science and putting business owners second.

I think the problems go much, much deeper than oil and fracking. American QOL is not sustainable for 8 billion people, and it only exists for a couple hundred million really anyway.

I’m all for making big sweeping changes but I am not one of the rich stakeholders who control how things work in this world.

With 8 billion humans it’s too hard to centralize control or do anything to realistically get people to follow the rules. Things being technically possible is one thing, but human nature means it’ll never actually happen. Humans are awful.

We’re so obsessed with rules that nobody actually follows and covering up how things actually work. Whistleblowers have their lives ruined and these giant multibillion dollar conglomerates get a slap on the wrist. This is the world we live in and the systems we push for actively dissuade it from getting better.

If I try to make the argument that the earth is overpopulated i’ll quickly get downvoted to oblivion in the typical thread.

There’s too many humans. The only hope of life surviving long term is the fall of humankind. The writing is on the wall in terms of heading towards an extinction event anyway so it’s not like we’ll need to do anything for it to happen.

It’s ok the real funding comes from Super PACs who don’t have the limits a campaign has. Nobody actually follows the 6600 rule in practice thanks to the Super PAC loophole.

why the hell that level of inefficiency was tolerated.

Patents, e.g. legal monopolies.

Maybe fines and penalties for undercutting someone who holds a patent should be scrapped for nonprofit manufacturers of generics.

Maybe profit should come second to the betterment of humanity.

It’s a truly bizarre single issue to focus on considering how high impact it is to the masses and how it presumably isn’t enabling them to make more money or solidify control.

If they just brought in a couple of populist policies that made the masses happy they probably would have majority control indefinitely on a platform of hate against the minority.

Christina Elson, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University, told Business Insider that many young people had embraced an idea she calls “safety capitalism.”

Ah yes, the executive director for the center for the study of capitalism says young folks want capitalism.

Come the fuck on.

There’s a lot of profit that comes out of someone seeking healthcare. Plus a sick worker can’t collect hourly wages, lowering expenses for business.

Clearly this is a pro-business policy.

What a strange action for the worst burger chain. The competitors have better chicken sandwiches too.

Their $5 meal is probably the cheapest but it also just feels… not so good. I miss the Wendy’s of 20 years ago.

Sir, this is not /c/lemmyshittiestposts