As for the middle class struggling without people falling out, I can see that. One of the things I’ve been complaining about for a while in the US is the lack of choices to actually live at your means and that goes together with the middle class struggling for sure

Oh the eugenics thing was related to minimum wage. I was mostly surprised about that since I hadn’t heard it before

“In the United States, the late 19th-century ideas for favoring a minimum wage also coincided with the eugenics movement…”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum...

True! But also minimum wage used to mean “what is needed to earn a reasonable standard of living” and lol it is not that now. I’d prefer that be the definition 🤷‍♀️

It was also a eugenics thing in the US apparently? so having an ahistorical perspective isn’t necessarily the worst thing

That is super real lol. The amount of expectations we push on people now that are unrealistic and unsustainable is horrific

(But I also think we could be doing significantly more as a society to improve the quality of life for everyone if we gave even a single fuck about being slightly more equal)

That’s fair. I have people in my head too who struggle to do it at more than that, including my ex wife and our kid. But it’s indeed difficult to have it in the abstract :)

That’s fair! I still see a huge disconnect from the methodology the article uses and the reality of people I know, and combining that with other signals I’m seeing just gives me a sense that the article is off. I’m sure they did their statistics correctly, I’m just wary of the data and methodology

I just don’t know any family that would consider themselves middle class on under $140k in most urban cities in the US. So it seems wild to me to suggest that $67k or even $80k counts when families at that income level have to measure their grocery bills out to not go hungry in the US

I’m seeing quotes like this “[…] a family of three needs over $80,000 to be considered middle class, rather than the roughly $67,000 it needs by our preferred definition. It needs over $200,000 to qualify as upper-middle class, whereas by our definition, it needs less than $135,000”

The way they’re calculating the data is so odd to me because the numbers don’t make sense if I map the people I know into them, and especially not with the lifestyle choices I see being associated with the middle class

Pergenant ??

Oh that makes complete sense! I’ve been thinking about doing that for the same reasons. The more I’m in the public sphere the more it seems unavoidable. Gender tax is a real shit sometimes

How do you keep those nails looking so good 😭 if mine even see me thinking about a hammer they’re DONE

It’s super normal in Europe too lol. I have to tell people I have signal or WhatsApp because the idea that I might have a phone number is just too fucking weird for this continent 😅

Oooh! This looks interesting 👀

It does if you can replace the existing person with someone who costs more than 30% less and maintain a relatively equal pace of development

But in practice you’d usually wanna replace them with a cost of 60%+ and that leads into offshoring of “utility labour”. The textile industry did this

Similar to what happened with calculators, essentially. We eradicated those and turned them into either white male programmers or minorities that punched cards into machines for poverty wages.

But we did that in twenty years. Not four. The economy can’t shift that quickly, let alone people 🤷‍♀️

I mean, the likely progression I see is that they “make it work” via a power law distribution, hiring reams of AI engineering people for slave wages in countries where western nation states exert oppressive influence

Collapsing the job market for any role lower than principal architect

Industry mental shifts are traumatic on the generational timescale! Look at the trades, it’s literally traumatic how quickly we industrialised them repeatedly over *decades* and they had unions! Support! Legislation!

We’re speedrunning this in under half a decade with none of that. It’s ludicrous