What’s really so bad about today’s society? Almost everyone has a higher standard of living than the last generation, even if paper wages might not be higher. We are also the first generation in the past 100 years to not bring the world to the brink of global war or nuclear annihilation.
I’m not opposed to a minimum wage, I just think $15 is too high and actually ends up hurting the people it is supposedly intended to help.
We still have time.
not so sure where you got that generational point from. I’ve only seen evidence contradicting that
“It’s basically a coin flip as to whether you’ll do better than your parents,” said economics Professor Raj Chetty, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and one of the study’s authors.
http://news.stanford.edu/2016/12/08/todays-children-face-tough-prospects-better-off-parents/
Also success is a lagging indicator. I have a suspicion that our current success will not continue given the damaging choices we are making on regulation, education, and infrastructure.
Isn’t that study based on income? Does that necessarily describe absolute standards of living? The same product today is better than the product from 30 years ago - healthcare, phones, computers, cars, and almost everything you can think of. So, earning $80k today maybe gets you the same absolute utility as $100k a generation ago. George Washington was the most important person in US history, but he lived like crap compared to today’s middle class. As a whole, the world is also much more socially progressive than it was compared to most points in history.
not if Mike “Pray the gay away” Pence has anything to do with it. Also, while i appreciate your point that progress has brought us so far, that doesnt mean everything is perfect and we should just throw our hands up and say this is it.
STL im also curious as to your comment on efficiency humans are tremendously wasteful and seem to be the only organisms on earth that pollute and use resources to near extinction. If you are talking biological use of energy thats one thing, but as a society we are incredibly inefficient compared to say ants (stumbled upon an ant video on youtube the other day, no particular reason why i picked them over bees or any other similar organism)
can’t say for sure until all organisms are found, although i hear there’s only seventeen creatures left to be discovered on earth. kind of makes me sad 
i think he means in a productive sense. like we can do a lot of shit they cant. and yes the idea that we should just live as robots powered by energy as oppose to food would be a lot better. DIGITAL IMMORTALS or digimons. lol
im down if youre all down, but if 1 person aint down, then im not down.
lmao digimons the k-mart pokemon?
Seattle is a toxic waste dump.
What’s not bad?
Get real, standard of living in the US is garbage, and much worse than the prior couple generations. There is only “on paper” quality of life, reality being much worse than the paper.
But now we have instagram and facebook, and all we have to give for access is our identities
Take a step back a few dozen eons ago. Humans were pretty much always the smartest animal around, but that wasn’t enough to get by on way back when. The one physical thing we can do better than pretty much any animal on earth? Run long distances. Why? Humans sweat and run upright. These two things are pretty much unique in the animal world and allow humans to run long distances at a pretty good speed. This is still evident today as some African tribes still use running as their primary weapon. They’ll chase down some four-legged herbivore until it overheats and has to stop and/or dies. They then just walk up to the beast, poke it with a sharp stick, and bingo-bango-bongo, tons of food.
But I digress. Humans evolved and survived long enough to use our huge brains because we’re the most efficient animal on the planet at regulating our body temperature and, thus, giving us the ability to run a marathon in basically the same time it takes a horse. (Horses almost always win the annual race {look it up} but it’s close and over 26 miles the human would only get closer and eventually run the horse to exhaustion and kick it in the head until it was dead and ready for tasty consumption.)
Are we the most efficient now? Uh, yeah. It’s only gotten better. Yesterday I did literally nothing and consumed 3,000 calories and got paid to do so. My Fitbit didn’t even hit 700 steps. That’s efficiency people!
I’m pretty sure the long distance running idea isn’t in vogue any longer because it would take too much effort to really develop the skill.
Very interesting. I did not know this. +1
+3
'cept about the Fitbit
really brah?
-1
net
+2
While I agree with everything, I disagree that this is how perception works for people. Research shows that it is both relative and absolute wealth that brings happiness for example. Although we live in larger houses, drive more expensive cars, and have mainframes in our pockets, I do not know if that registers with the larger population. And while I wish everyone evaluated “objective” reality, I realize that dealing with how things are perceived is just as important. Don’t you find it weird the political message is of economic struggle despite our current unemployment rate? While things are better, people just don’t feel that way. I think any policy has to be mindful of how humans perceive the world around them. Either we have to explain to people how to analyze income relative to what it buys (which it seems like a tough task for people who struggle with present value calculations) or we ensure our policies take how they perceive the world into account. This wouldn’t be as true if the crowd didn’t change the technocrats based on these beliefs, but that is the system we are in.
Absolute wealth - GW could afford the absolute best dentist in the world, albeit with no anasthesia, since it hasn’t been invented yet
Relative wealth - I can afford only a bad dentist, because I am relatively poor. But I get anasthesia before they drill.
I would rather be me.
Jesus Christ, thanks for the pep talk Dad.
You’re right though. I graduated in '11 and can’t even get preliminary interviews at retail banks.