Ok, but how did the perimeter go from 4 to 24??

r/unexpectedfactorial

And for reference, X AE A-XII is meant to be pronounced “ex ash archangel”. Which I’m sure is obvious to everyone that reads it lol

I wasn’t saying that I thought that, I didn’t give my take at all, I was trying to be helpful in explaining what the other commenter meant. But since you’re calling me crazy…

To give my take on it, you’re right, there’s all sorts of ways that the lifestyles aren’t at all comparable, many things haven’t had the insane inflation that real estate has, so a person making 250k can obviously take a lot more vacations, go out to dinner more, buy more tech, etc than a middle class person from a few decades ago. But when it comes to buying homes, it gets a lot more comparable. Homes where I grew up have increased 4-5x in price over the last 25 years, so a family with a household income of 60k-ish (which is solidly middle class) buying a house that’s 3x their annual income would have been pretty typical in the early 2000’s. Now, if those same houses are being bought by households making 250k, it would be basically the same ratio of 3-4x their income.

So in home purchasing power (and that area only) low 6 figures is absolutely middle class, and anyone making under 6 figures has the home purchasing power of what used to be lower class

For me it’s just the fact that people have delved so deep into their echo chambers that they’ve lost all sense of what regular people think. Like I’m fine with someone being an extreme communist, they can have that opinion, but it seems like a lot of people on here talk to other extreme communists so much that they think more nuanced communists are somehow right wing. It doesn’t matter how much you try to concede to acknowledge their viewpoint, their personal Overton windows have shifted so far that they exclude everyone but people exactly like them, and it just makes conversations impossible.

Yeah, it certainly isn’t everyone in the older generations, no group is ever a monolith. I was generalizing the general sentiment that I’ve seen, but I’m also in an ultra-conservative area that tends to be very “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, so my perspective is probably skewed too.

The distribution of that pie is also being skewed. Technology has brought prices slightly down (relative to income) for a lot of things that we buy, meaning that we get better prices and more variety on things like food, clothes, travel, and obviously electronics, but a couple of unavoidable things like housing prices and college tuition have exploded so dramatically that it totally overshadows the modest gains that we get. Both are things that only need to be paid for once, so anyone that went to school and bought a house before prices exploded now gets to enjoy cheap housing and cheap commodities, while anyone unlucky enough to come after is just screwed. I think that’s part of why older generations are so unsupportive of how much of a struggle it is for millenials and gen Z, the economy has gone to crap, but so far its only really hit the young

They’re saying that someone that makes $250,000 today lives the lifestyle that would have been considered middle class 20 years ago, not that that salary is at all a median

Honestly, the fact that apple used usb-c on it’s “pro” iPads but not the regular iPad is all the proof we need that even apple thinks usb-c is better

But what you’re missing is that being vegetarian wouldn’t be possible without the conveniences of our modern world. You’re relying on plants that have been heavily modified to be more nutritious to humans, and you’re relying on a variety that would have been difficult to find pre industrialization, and absolutely impossible to a hunter-gatherer. It’s not meat company propaganda to realize that human’s evolved to eat meat, it’s evident in everything about our physiology. From an evolutionary point of view, even farming is startlingly recent, an industrial world economy hasn’t even registered yet, so even though we’re living in a modern world, we’re still dealing with bodies that were built to hunt. That’s why so many types of overeating are such big issues, this farmed abundance just isn’t something that we evolved to deal with.

None of that takes away from the fact that vegetarianism is feasible and healthy today, I think that it’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can survive without meat. All that I’m saying is that we need to recognize it for the modern luxury that it is, instead of saying that it was ever the norm

Sure, nobody ate anything in the quantities that we eat today, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a crucial part of our diet. It’s amazing that modern industrialized humans are able to get enough calories and protein from a diet of varied plants, but if you’re a hunter gatherer you don’t have the luxury of a variety of genetically modified protein rich plants, you need meat if you’re going to grow. That’s the niche we evolved to fill, it’s why we have a highly acidic gut, a medium length digestive tract common in omnivores, and teeth designed to tear meat. It doesn’t take a lot of meat to meet a person’s protein requirements, the occasional successful hunt is enough, but without any they would die.

This. It’s also not accurate to say it’s the warmest we’ve been in the past 10,000 years, it was likely warmer during the roman warm period, and potentially a couple of other points. So we can only really say it’s the warmest we’ve seen in the last couple hundred years.

That’s not to say this isn’t concerning, we’re on track to smash the roman warm periods average temperatures within our lifetimes and make the earth the hottest it’s been since the paleoscene, which would have massive ramifications. But we’re not there yet, the problem is that we will likely get there in the next few decades.