Interesting!

Would you know where to find just the average/median income of a household, instead of an individual?

That would be closer to the same rough math I’m doing with the US figures.

If you were to try to set this up for another scenario, not a family of 4, but say, a single mom or dad with one kid, well then all the numbers change significantly.

And yeah, the … the whole mess of it is… who actually qualifies for what actual benefits, at what income levels?

A huge problem with the way the US is set up (the article goes into this) is that basically you end up with multiple glass ceilings that you have to break through.

You have to increase your income by substantial, not incremental amounts, for the net income gain to actually offset the benefits you now lose from only slightly breaching some income threshold.

So the whole system actually functions to disincentivize or punish people who… ‘succeed’ more… but not enough more.

Now, take that as your base scenario, and now… you tell me:

How much debt does it make sense for you to go into, to get a college degree, that… may or may not actually result in you either… staying at the same income level, only slightly breaching some threshold/glass ceiling, or perhaps, substantially breaching that threshold/glass ceiling?

Yeah.

…yeah.

Thats how bad it is.

I guess now maybe you better understand … why I am attempting to describe and convey … how bad it actually is and likely would get if things went ‘hot’ in terms of active armed resistance.

So hey, there, what caused this, how did we get here?

Full answer is complicated, but big parts of the answer are: vanity, selfishness, convenience, complacency, ignorance, normalcy bias.

Yeah, those are holodomor / holocaust numbers.

Thats how fucking bad this is.

I can’t really think of much to add to that… you and I seem to very much be on the same wavelength.

Oh, I guess I can update some of your numbers.

I used to be the data analyst / db admin for a large non profit of homeless shelters.

The PIT counts, the numbers we use as our ‘total homeless’ count basis?

They’re bullshit, the methodology is garbage, and the way its … attempted to be implemented is also garbage.

I was at one point able to compare our much more detailed data set of … need, number of people calling in basically, for some kind of help, vs how many we actually could help, or redirect to another non prof or something to get help… vs the PIT numbers for our area.

Long story short, a few years back, you needed to multiply the PIT by roughly 3x to 5x, to get an actual accurate number.

Carry that forward to now, the economic devastation that is occuring?

We are currently looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 5 to 10 million people homeless for at least 3 consecutive months, where homeless is defined as: you do not actually live at a location that you can recieve mail at, or you live in a homeless shelter, or you have been couch surfing (you’re living somewhere you aren’t on the lease for) for at least 3 months.

There are so many people who live in cars or RVs… because it used to be legal to do that. After the Grants Pass decision, it basically isn’t anymore, anywhere in the US. So your ‘home’ can and will be impounded and you will become ‘fully’ homeless.

Living on the streets is now also just actually illegal in basically all of the US. Everytime you hear a cop say that some encampment was contacted and offered support services before they cleared the encampment?

What that means is the cops gave people the numbers of shelters that are compmetely full and have no excess capacity.

Hows that for spin phrasing, eh? Makes the people in the encampment seem voluntarily noncompliant, when the truth is the cops gave them either utterly useless advice, or commands that are impossible to follow, depending on how you wanna look at it.

So yeah. 5 to 10 million people are homeless right now, thats gonna get worse, and a significant proportion of those people die from exposure, starvation, disease, develop a drug addiction, die from that, or just fun ole fashioned physical violence.

And, last I checked, its basically 60% of Americans right now, who if they missed a one paycheck, or had one $500+ sudden expense, well they’d have to go (even further) into debt for that, so basically 60% of the country is one bad day away from a fuse that lights and then blows up 3 to 12 months later in a debt death spiral, now they’re also homeless.

They’ll likely end up in the DHS/ICE/FEMA gulag archipelago that’s been hastily built to handle all the deportations, or basically its cousin or some specific subsection of it.

Oh well I mean, I’m sorry I don’t have the relevant data for… every country on earth, my bad.

What do those numbers look like for Chile?

EDIT:

… Also… Millenials and Gen Z are US-centric terms.

Their etymylogical origin derives from describing generations within the US.

What other country on earth has a mass shooting epidemic, predatory student loans and college costs crisis?

I think its reasonable to respond to a comic made by someone from the Los Angeles, that references US issues… with data relevant to the US.

Oh, we did that, remember Bernie Sanders?

How did that go?

Oh, the Boomer dominated DNC ratfucked 'im.

…Now it wouldn’t be the case that a Boomer would give out of touch, provably useless advice, now would it?

No no no, they always know exactly what everyone else should be doing.

Ok, now do the average age of congresspeople, governors, the president, supreme court justices.

For House Reps its ~58, Senators ~64.

Voting, for most of Millenial’s lifetimes, and all of Gen Z’s lifetimes, has basically been broken, in terms of being actually representative, due to pervasive and worsening gerrymandering.

And voting is now about to become truly and utterly pointless, after Trump cancels or rigs the midterms, as he has more than once now said he would like to do.

So what you actually mean is that uh, we now have to conduct a revolution.

Against the Boomers, who are still running everything.

The Boomers, Trump’s most reliable voting age-block.

The Boomers, who have been… the age of the average home buyer, for the last ~20 years.

(Meaning that the housing market has been dominated by and rigged in favor of Boomers for their entire adult lives)

The Boomers, the wealthiest generation, with the most money to throw at companies and politicians that they like, in a country that has been an overt oligarchy for over a decade, and has always been a functional oligarchy, where money has a much stronger correlation to passed laws and policy changes than popular support does.

… The Boomers are going to go down in history as the spoiled brats who destroyed the country, and possibly the world, thanks to their climate change denial.

We will be blaming ya’ll long after you are dead, because … sometimes… you can only fix a problem via reform within a certain time window, and if you miss that time window, well now its more like trying to unbreak an egg.

https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

tl:dr; to actually afford the bare minimum costs of living in the US, the average family of 4 needs an income of of ~140k.

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentiles/

Only the top ~29% of households in the US have that much income.

So uh, basically, 7/10ths chance the answer to the question is:

No, not unless you want to raise kids you can’t actually afford to raise, provide with a decent childhood.

How to amputate your digits / hand, with extra steps.

“OP discovers quaternions.”

How do you solve gimbal lock?

3Vector Math / Matrix Algebra?

Nonsense rotational transforms?

You do nonsense harder.

Imaginary 4th Dimension, harder.

Shut up, don’t think about it, yes it will work if you don’t think about it.

… I guess that makes it like, the opposite of Orc Wauuugh or whatever?

Oh I also don’t disagree with the implication(s) of your question there.

This is a do or die moment, a hinge point or era of history.

I am just trying to make very clear that… now that we, collectively, have allowed the situation to get to the point it is now at?

Well now, instead of removing a small tumor or two, a bit of chemo maybe… now we’re at stage 4, its likely terminal, and none of the options are good, easy, muchless guaranteed to work.

Changing the situation, solving the problem… is now simply unavoidably going to be extremely costly, in ways that… probably most people who regularly post on internet forums think they understand, think they are or could be ready for… but in reality they likely are not.

Reading about the horrors of a civil war, watching a documentary or movie or reading a book about it, … that’s one thing.

Living it is quite another.

… do you really wanna live forever?

… can you handle anyone or everyone you know, essentially randomly dying?

People are gonna actually have to answer those questions, at least to themselves, honestly.

And our culture is primarily one of consumerist escapism… so this is going to cause even more existential crises and psychoses than we have seen so far.

We’re gonna see a lot of people’s true colors.

A lot of people simply will not be able to cope, they’ll implode, collapse in on themselves, or maybe explode outwardly.

And then, after that, we’ll have to see how many people are actually any kind of competent and effective, at living, at resisting… after all the toys and treats go away.

MicroSlop:

It’s not your computer, it’s our computer.

[followed by Bible length TOS]

While I generally agree with everything you’ve said…

This, what we have right now?

The early access alpha preview of what could potentially happen.

Try and imagine an actual artillery strike or JDAM strike on your neighborhood, or, all the water stops working safely due to either a treatment plant getting blown up or intentionally sabotaged and poisoned.

Health and sanitation just stop … being things that exist and work, and soon half the city has some new plague, more or less indefinitely.

Oh you live in an enemy city, its really cold this winter, really hot this summer?

Click, boom, fizzle, pop. No more power for ya’ll, have fun.

… it can get so, so much worse than what we are seeing right now.

Yep, exactly.

State borders don’t represent the relevant people groups well at all.

Go look at the greater Idaho movement to see basically exactly what I mean, a decade long drive to break the eastern counties of WA and OR off, and into joining Idaho.

The other huge problem is this:

Cities are generally like islands, need power, water, food, which typically comes from places outside the city.

So you don’t need to even seige them, you just cut the links, and they’ll largely tear themselves apart.

But the flip side of that is that they’re also major logistics hubs and manufacturing centers, by and large… and, most stuff that gets produced outside a city has to go into a or at least near a city at some point before it can actually become something useful, or find an actual market.

So its a kind of … not quite MAD, but almost, more like mutually assured misery.

One thing you can take away is that anyone, in any location during something like this, is going to benefit from being as autarkic and resourceful as they can be, at whatever scale makes sense in a particular situation.

The big superstructures of society basically just break, and you, your buddies, your community, whatever, people with secondary backup plans, alternative economies, largely decoupled systems for providing the bare minimum + a few luxuries, thats what has a better chance of making it through something like this.

Oh, along with that comes: Repair everything, the consumable model of ‘stuff’ is now an insane death trap, not a flex.

Anything complex is unlikely to be easily, wholly replaced… makes a lot more sense to fix up shit, re use and clean up everything that can be reused and cleaned up safely.

Oh right, and uh, kiss the idea of generally free and safe medium to long distance travel goodbye.

See also:

Syria, for roughly the last decade.

… This is a self fulfilling prophecy.

She’s met men who were hard to get with.

They weren’t interested in her, or they didn’t hit her radar level, and it never even occured to her to consider them as potential partners, or they were already married or in committed, faithful monogamous relationships.

She’s telling on herself, and doesn’t realize it.

If she’s only met men who were easily to get with… that’s all she’s looking for, all she can see.

And this applies in reverse as well, or in any other gender … direction.

This is just myopia, idpol, immaturity… we’re really still doing this?

That got a chuckle outta me, a knee slap even, hahah!

They can do that, but the next update they actually decide to apply… will rewrite all/most of those changes.

Bazzite is so user friendly that I could, and did, set it up on a Steam Deck…

…without a mouse or keyboard, with just the Steam Deck as a controller!

Then I figured out how to set up containers, and built a Debian environment, that can and did successfully compile different game engines from source.

Again, without a mouse or keyboard.

… Did I mention I’m currently crippled in the right wrist and shoulder and arm?

Bazzite on a Deck is extremely usable.

Just had to tweak the base Steam Control mapoing thingy a bit to be able to use common shortcuts, figure out how to do a kind of half southpaw layout for the mouse -> trackpad stuff.

Correct.

If you can’t figure a modern linux distro, that is specifically geared towards being n00b friendly (there are a good number) …

… its time to retire from thinking you are tech savvy, its time to hang up that hat, time to humble yourself a bit, realize you overspecialized in the wrong direction.

Checks out.

Presuming this is occuring in or near Seattle, yep, yep, the “Seattle Chill” has these days basically become ‘Permaonline / hikkikomori / over exposed to fear inducing media / paranoid main character myopia to the point of delusional antisociality.’

And then you have other people who have like, basic social skills, who do not become infuriated by a bit of small talk with a rando at the same bus stop.