Go out and volunteer to help someone else.

Seeing another person’s problems is a sure way to make your own problems seem smaller.

This has been going on for a long time.

Back in the Reagan Era the US was miles ahead of the Soviet Union’s military by any metric. So the Right came up with a new metric, “throw weight.” The Soviets had inferior missile technology, so they had to build bigger weapons to carry the same size warhead. The War Party would go to Congress and the public and show how much bigger the Soviet missiles were and claim that it proved how weak the West was and why we had to spend more.

It was like saying a musket from 1776 was better than a M-16 because it fired a larger bullet.

Welcome to the interwebs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR.5#:~:text=VR.5 is an American science-fiction television series first

Perfect 1990’s TV show.

Read the rules.

If you want to argue the minutia of building codes of the past, I’m sure there’s a sub for that.

I don’t think that the 1960’s life style was ‘lesser’ than today’s by any means.

Check “Hell’s Angels” by Hunter Thompson. There’s a chapter where he runs down the economics of being a hippie/biker/drop out.

A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and then go on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boy freind.

There was a popular travel series. The first book was “Europe on $5.00 A Day.” Eventually, they had “Paris…” “London…” and other great vacations all for $5.00/day.

Sporting events, movies, and concerts were much cheaper.

If you wanted distraction, there were book stalls and news stands everywhere.

When I make a random observation I like to put “[off topic]” at the start.

I make the $1.00 minimum wage/$11,000.00 house argument a lot because it so clearly shows how far down we’ve gone.

A lot of people try to refute it by pointing out how much “richer” people are today.

I was confused because I thought you were trying to address the main point, not adding an aside

See?

Yes.

That’s exactly what I was saying

Unless you’re trying to say that all the advances made since 1960 are a direct result of inflation, nothing you posit makes any sense.

Talk to the people who were around at the time, or look at books or essays.

Archie Bunker was often cited as a ‘middle class’ figure.

lemme technical comment.

I’m Dagwood and I was arguing that we’d actually had a ‘middle class’ where the average wage earner could move ahead in the world by working 40 hours a week.

Sohoriots was arguing that the middle class was an illusion.

I think you were trying to commnet to Soho and not me.

Okay?

You do know that there are people walking around your town who were alive in 1970, right?

. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

In 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000.00.

No. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.

Look up “Hells Angel’s” by Hunter Thompson. There’s a chapter where he runs down the economics of dropping out circa 1970. A biker could work a Union stevedore job for six months and earn enough to live on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musicain boyfriend.

That was before Nixon started printing paper dollars to pay for Vietnam and Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the rich.

And had money to go to the nudie bar…

We need to stop using the term “middle class.”

Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.

Today it’s two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.

We’re in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.

[off topic?]

“Lioness” with Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman is a weird combination of spec ops porn and Left politics.

“Lioness” refers to a CIA program to target the wives/sisters/daughters of major terrorists. Kidman runs Saldana who in turn runs the teams on the ground. Their latest target is top financier of terror and his daughter is getting married soon…

In one episode Kidman tells Saldana that the West’s leaders are too stupid and cowardly to get us off the oil habit.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13111078/

By that logic, every Union is a cult. All I said was that people should organize and show up and vote.

“The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein. It’s a really good science fiction novel and the handbook for a lot of Libertarians.

You can read and enjoy it as a story, but if you examine it you’ll see all the hoops the author had to jump through in order to make his society work.

One of the most glaring examples is that there are almost no guns in a prison where machine tools are readily available.