Article:

https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/living-pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque-you-are-not-alone-68-of-americans-are-too/3923390/

Source Study:

https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PYMNTS-New-Reality-Check-February-March-2024.pdf

Oh hey, Forbes says nearly 72% of those living paycheck to paycheck have less than $2,000 in savings!

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/

Yeah, this is what an economic collapse looks like, Great Depression 2.0, hold onto your butt, and good luck.

EDIT:

We also have a massive negative net worth problem.

Negative net worth means you have more debt than assets.

Because this is difficult to measure accurately, unless you are a credit bureau…we’ve got anywhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 3 Americans with more debt than assets, ie, they are de facto debt slaves.

https://www.creditkarma.com/about/commentary/americans-have-a-net-worth-problem-and-its-not-positive

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/whats-your-net-worth-25-of-americans-say-theirs-is-%240-or-less

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/

These are all from 2 or 3 years ago, I imagine its now closer to 1 in 3 than 1 in 10.

dehydrated spongebob screaming

I knead ittttt!

Oops, I assumed you were Gen Z or A!

Uh, uh,… radical, tubular, or something, lol.

… Groovy?

lol.

Yeah, there’s a lot of fairly age specific lingo in all age brackets… and its possible the ‘mad hops’ phrasing also had a regional component that I just never noticed due to not travelling to many other parts of the US as a kid?

Uh yeah, maybe its a bit outdated of slang now, but … ‘you’ve got hops’ is basically ‘you can jump high’.

Hops is … I guess just older, 90s/00s, Millenial slang for ‘jumping ability/prowess/skill’, something like that.

‘Mad hops’ meaning like… how you’d say ‘she’s got mad skills’, its meant as a uh, positive compliment, its an adjective basically meaning ‘impressive’ or ‘unbelievable’.

I was gonna say this too.

Bazzite is functional, has helpful utilities pre built in, and is pretty idiot proof for the average user, as compared to many other linux distros.

99% of it ‘just works’.

Use Bazaar, install flatpak, other useful stuff is pre-installed, use them, if you wanna do something fancier, documentation exists and is pretty good.

Beyond that, for the truly tech illiterate, you just need to make the icons and DE look the same as what they’re used to, and then grandma will probably be able to figure it out… I think you can fairly easily do this with a good number of linux distros, and there are some that are just designed around this concept.

jump

Bro, I can jump so high!

Oh yeah?

jump

Damn dude, you got mad hops too!

We should go jump ourselves on top of some cheddar, let’s go!

-fin-

Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:

https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/

Literally a dangerous psycopath.

This is basically ‘tortured kittens to death as a kid’ level shit.

If you made a TV show or Movie where a character did this, people would say it was heavy handed and lacked subtlely, it is too over the top, it isn’t a well written bad guy (gal) character, it’s schlocky.

On a related note, the latest Trump administration cabinent picks and antics unironically cured my impostor syndrome.

If these gaggle of fucking demented backstabbing morons are good enough to run this country…

And they can show that about half the country is actually so stupid and or intentionally blind and or evil to somehow not realize their cult leader just obviously is a huge rapist and pedoohile…

Then I am better than this country.

Better qualified, more empathetic, more competent.

Turns out it was just angry clowns gaslighting us the whole time.

Well uh fuck em, this is all so stupid that I now actually have the correct amount of self-confidence and self-respect, it is indeed this entire society that is a joke, not that I am somehow fundamentally inadequate.

And, roughly 20 years later, the internet has an arguably equally infamous meme answer:

An anime vtuber screaming “Plap Plap Plap GET PREGNANT GET PREGNANT!”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3uPPNHVma5Y

So uh, I guess this meme has come full circle and is now in a sense, the internet growing to adult age and answering itself?

Here’s how America “works”:

Fuck you, there is barely any public transportation, and anyone who uses it or some non personal csr transist system is literally hated by most of society.

Oh and of course, cost of housing goes up exponentially as you try to live closer to where jobs actually exist.

Also, cars are all wildly unaffordable, and most places won’t even consider hiring you if you don’t have one.

Its actually up to 68% now.

Metric - Handshakes

Buy this car to drive to work

Drive to work to pay for this car

Buy this car to drive to work

Drive to work

Oh no, I totally botched that translation 😁 I meant this more in the sense of “I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet”. Like when 99% of the country is great but you’re complaining about the 1% that isn’t.

Hey, no worries!

I think my guesses were fairly close?

Either way, if English is not your first language, you speak it better than most Americans I know, and I appreciate you translating / conversing in it so well… I am of course your stereotypical American who only speaks English, lol.

As to general hatred of the poor… yeah, I know it occurs basically everywhere, to a sickening degree.

I’ve had many Eurozone online friends over the course of my life, and they’ve explained to me how in even the highly developed areas of Europe, each different country has their own fun flavor of social ostricization and bureaucratic mess of how assistance is qualified for.

As to the religious angle: I get the sense that we broadly agree, disagree on a few things, and some may be lost in translation.

I totally agree that religious extremism, religiously motivated acts of hatred and violence of all kinds are detestable.

I am an atheist myself, but uh, I realize that though I may disagree ultimately with whatever religion as an explanation for how the world works… many religious people are not extremists, and despise their own religion being tarnished by participating in horrific acts.

But at the same time yes, the absolutely insane irony of Israel, a state made for genocide victims… is now committing a genocide?

Fucking absurd.

Maddening.

…

Anyway, I am not sure that the rest of what I’m writing is necessary or relevant, you may already know some of it, but it is hopefully helpful additional context as to how politics and terminology surrounding Jews functions in the US:

In the US we have a term ‘Secular Jew’.

Non-practicing Jew, Non-devout Jew, Irreligious Jew.

Terms like that.

What this basically means is, someone who is Jewish by culture, by heritage, who partakes in some level of Jewish customs or traditions… but they are really atheists or agnostics, they do not really believe that the Torah, the Old Testament, is more than an important piece of their history, they do not devoutly follow or study it.

It is quite common in the US that many Jews are this kind of irreligious, and they are often quite politically liberal or left.

Conversely, in the US, on the right wing of politics, we have many, many fundamentalist extremist Christians who believe strongly in an apocalyptic doomsday scenario that very much revolves around Israel, the state, Israel the land, Israel the Jews living in Israel.

So, you end up with this wacky nonsense world where… Jews, left of center, in the US, say ‘Israel does not represent all Jews, their actions are very bad.’

And then the other side, the right of center US Christian extremists, say ‘Israel does represent all Jews, to criticize Israel is to criticize Jews.’

They say this despite most of the actual Jews in the US saying and believing the opposite.

It is madness.

I get some sense that this also occurs in European countries, but I am not familiar with… to what extent this occurs, I am not familiar with to what extent it is a massive driver of politics in general.

This is what spammers, scammers, identity thieves, ‘pig-butcherers’, credit collections do.

It absolutely works.

Corporations lie blatantly all the fucking time.

Its just that they lie in ways that usually are not able to be legally defined as some kind of a legally actionable version of a lie.

They are usually more worried with ever having outwardly admitting something that they could be sued over, than they are with any kind of human to human sense of accountability or believability.

Every, single, thing they are mass releasing or designing as an official stance has gone through some kind of legal team, or a team under a legal team that follow’s guidelines from a legal team.

This is just how megacorps work.

They are not people, they are a sociopathic machine, operated by people who very much tend to be sociopaths.

Here’s the summarized version:

Be Polite.

Act as if you only understand ‘the effects’, have a nebulous notion of ‘the cause’.

Act like you know little other than this, and insist they explain it to you like you are a five year old.

Waste as much of their time as possible, without becoming hotheaded, instead become sad-confused.

“I’m not so much angry, as I am disappointed” type of vibe / energy.

And if possible, be genuinely kind to the low level, actual people you talk to, they literally do not make the rules.

She made her money running a company that removes 61,000 homes from the market as available for normal people to buy as their primary home.

vs

EDIT: want to be clear that she didn’t deserve to die for the work she did,

…

What would Spok say?

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

…

61,000 homes x bare minimum 2.6 avg household size = 158,600.

Homelessness rate in the US is now at least 3% of the total population.

158,600 x 0.03 = 4,758.

Homelessness is an extremely dangerous, life-threatening, often fatal condition.

In summary, nah, she absolutely deserved to die for the work she did, regardless of whatever the actual specifics of this incident are.

1 life vs almost 5k likely deaths?

This math ain’t as hard as people seem to think.

If she ran a company that knowingly, intentionally, poisoned that many people’s food or water, distributed that many HIV contaminated needles, sold that many defective airbags or brakepads…

…if the process wasn’t so abstracted with so many steps, the moral judgement would be a lot easier for a lot more people to make.

Keep in mind: Her job was to literally operate and maintain the abstraction.

I have negative pity for this exploitative cancer formely emobodied in the form of a living human being.

Luigi 1:7

Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.