This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.
An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.
Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.
There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.
Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.
Same vibes as Kim Jong Un touring a factory.
20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.
Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.
So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.
I think a big part of the problem is that quality of life is correlated with longevity. Some people start having health issues in their 40s and die in their 60s. Others start having health issues in their 70s and die in their 80s.
And so the question becomes whether maximizing high quality years adds to the low quality years, or not. And so the question might not be about extending life itself, but about extending healthy years.
Any idiot can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.
But some who has earned a penny in interest has spent time as both worker and owner.
I’m not talking about people who only make a small amount of interest or investment return over the course of their lifetimes. I’m talking about people who are already unambiguously middle class (between 25th and 75th percentile incomes), who end up relying on investment income to provide most of their retirement expenses.
I’m talking about people with half million dollar 401(k)s that return hundreds of thousands over the course of a retirement. Some of it is principal but most of it is gains/return/interest.
Basically if you’re able to retire in America, you’re an “owner” for those decades. Yes, there are people in America who can’t afford to retire, but most people in the middle class can.
Also, its not the conventional way. You 100% made that up and what you’re describing is petite bougouise.
Defining the middle class as middle incomes is pretty conventional. I think you’ve misunderstood my description of the middle class (people who fit the definition generally have income from both work and from investment) as a definition.
So let me be perfectly clear:
And hey, I was gonna let it go but it’s clear your autocorrect has now adopted it as a new word it will happily let you spell wrong repeatedly: it’s spelled petit bourgeois, or petit bourgeoisie for plural.
The median net worth of a 65-year-old in the United States is about $390k, so the income it produces is generally a modest supplement to social security. At the 75th percentile, which is also generally considered middle class, net worth is about $1.1 million and easily enough to provide a comfortable retirement lifestyle.
The idea that someone is middle class because they’ve earned a penny in bank interest is absurd.
No, the idea is that the middle class (defined in the conventional way) spends time in both the “worker” category and the “owner” category.
The ordinary middle class pathway is to work for 30-50 years and then retire on their savings (or a defined contribution retirement plan) or to rely on a defined benefit pension fund that is itself invested in securities, aka capital. This is the baseline expectation of retirement planning for the middle class in the U.S.: the investments/savings provide the cash to live on, while ownership of the primary residence shields the retiree from certain housing costs, or can provide cash flow through a reverse mortgage.
Through the power of compounding, a 40+ year savings plan generally increases its value over time so that the vast majority of the value comes from return on investment rather than invested principal.
If you want specific calculations, we can do that to show that the typical middle class path takes in more than “a very small amount” in their retirement savings/investments.
Or are you planning on coming back with a load of caveats
These details are obvious from my first comment in this thread, that the middle class in the United States works its way into an “ownership class” in time for retirement, through savings/investment. That’s exactly what I meant in that comment, and spelling it out makes it pretty clear what I meant at that time, and that I haven’t shifted my position in this thread.
Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.
I’m specifically pointing out the problem with the “how they earn income” definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there’s no such thing as a middle class They’re not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as “middle class” under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.
So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn’t a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn’t earn money without their own labor).
Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).
If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I’d still point out there’s a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.
If you work for your money, you’re part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you’re part of the problem.
But the middle class is those who are able to leverage working for their money to accumulate capital to where they can live off of the proceeds of that owned capital. If you’re able to retire, you eventually become part of the ownership class.
There is a shrinking middle class but the actual people in it are those who split their adult lives into eventually retiring on their wealth, accumulated through working.
I agree. Stated another way, imagine the trolley is headed towards 5 people, and you have the power to pull the lever to divert it to a path where there are no people. Even if someone tied those 5 to the tracks with the intent to kill, your failure to save their lives (at no additional cost to others) is widely regarded by most systems of ethics/morality as a moral failing. Yes, the person who tied the tracks bears blame, but so does the person who could’ve easily saved them but chose to let them die.
It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.
This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.
The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.
In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.
Yeah, you can think of it as a simple transaction fee for debit transactions, and a full blown credit and risk shifting system for credit transactions. The banks charge high fees for credit transactions because they’re actually lending money and bearing some credit risk for them, whereas the debit transactions are just moving money from one account to another.
This stuff takes a while to get going.
The FTC sued to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision in December 2022, but lost.
DOJ sued Google in January 2023, and won their trial last month.
The FTC and DOJ started rulemaking on new merger disclosure and review requirements in June 2023.
The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023.
DOJ sued Ticketmaster/Live Nation in May 2024.
The last two years have shown aggressive antitrust enforcement for the first time in about 50 years, when Robert Bork basically convinced the Supreme Court and all Republicans to impose almost impossible standards for antitrust regulations.
I think this article misleadingly states what the stats show.
Each American generation is less religious than the older generations, and Gen Z is no different. It’s just that Gen Z women are far less religious than previous generations, a bigger gap than the men. From the study that provides the underlying stats:
What’s remarkable is how much larger the generational differences are among women than men. Gen Z men are only 11-points more religiously unaffiliated than Baby Boomer men, but the gap among women is almost two and a half times as large. Thirty-nine percent of Gen Z women are unaffiliated compared to only 14 percent of Baby Boomer women.
In other words, Gen Z men are less religious than Boomer men. This basic conclusion doesn’t seem to come through in the original article, which almost suggests that young men are more religious than older generations.
I love the way you weave in the cultural context, including the culture war parts of modern political and policy debates, the business/corporate trends in entertainment, in your telling of this history. It’s clear you know your stuff, and you’ve helped me understand something new (the influences these slasher films drew from, from Agatha Christie), grounded in stuff I might have already known (the actual movies themselves and the cultural context they were released into, including how people looked at boobs before the internet).
So thank you. This comment is awesome, and you make this place better.
Racists would pay quite a bit of money to be able to target certain ethnic groups.
Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.
That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.