I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.

No, the Red Lobster insolvency was driven by declining sales and increasing debt, amid some shady corporate shenanigans with their finances. When they filed, they were about $30 million in the hole (even assuming their high valuations for their intangible assets).

Private equity owners (Golden Gate) made them sell off the land they owned, only to lease it back at above market rates. Then sold the chain to its biggest seafood supplier (Thai Union), who used the restaurant as an outlet for their wholesale seafood rather than as a standalone profitable business (which resulted in huge quality drop off and declining sales).

They were headed in the wrong direction, and the $11 million they lost on endless shrimp didn’t make a big difference. It was circling the drain anyway, based on big strategic errors (or just plain old private equity fuckery).

Oh wow, windows! I don’t think I can afford this place.

Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.

Here’s a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.

By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.

Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.

Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That’s only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.

So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month’s rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month’s rent.

The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.

1987: Black Monday

That one didn’t really matter that much to regular Americans. Less than a third of Americans owned stock back then, and that crash didn’t have an obvious cause from actual economic fundamentals. And the Fed managed to contain the liquidity crisis, as your linked Wikipedia page describes, so that the broader economy was largely unaffected.

Recessions matter. Stock market crashes only matter when they are caused by, or are the cause of, an actual recession in the real world.

That’s what I’m getting at in my first comment. Any explosive is inherently in a state of high stored chemical energy. That energy will want to come out somehow. And if it isn’t released, it will always stay there, ready to be released at any time.

It’s the equivalent to stacking a bunch of really heavy objects on really high shelves above where people walk. When that energy gets released, it’s going to be really destructive. And if that energy gets released in an unsupervised, unplanned way, people are gonna get hurt.

slowly release the chemical energy to the ground

In what form? Like a really hot rock that warms the earth around it for a few decades? That’s dangerous in itself, and, like my example about electrical batteries, susceptible to their own runaway reactions that cause fires or explosions.

That’s just not how chemistry works.

Every bomb, grenade, or other munition will have some kind of explosive substance, which contains a large amount of chemical energy that is ordinarily released very quickly as kinetic energy and heat, in a big explosion. These weapons are designed to where the explosive is resilient against accidental or incidental detonation. So there are a ton of safeguards in place to prevent these things from blowing up unexpectedly.

The problem is that the energy contained within those chemical bonds is still always going to be there. And there’s not an easy way to gradually release that energy. That’s why unexploded ordnance is usually disposed of by blowing it up, in place, with an external explosion. The deterioration of the safeguards around accidental detonation makes the whole thing less safe, so the safest thing to do is to detonate it in place.

Even chemical batteries, which are designed for gradual release of the stored chemical energy, can sometimes overheat and cause a runaway reaction of a battery fire. Deterioration of the device is bad for controlling how that immense quantity of stored energy gets released.

So if you have a device that is hard to accidentally detonate, how will you make it so that the explosive degrades over time, without causing an explosion at an unexpected time?

Am I crazy or are the comments in this thread all about different ages? Well, I’ll defend the existence of children’s music.

Children’s music is great for teaching young children (under the age of 2) the basics of music. A clear melody (often in C major), simple rhythm, some basic song structure, rhyming lyrics, and lots and lots of repetition gets children listening and singing at an age before they can form coherent sentences. These are skills they learn to encourage not just later composition and performance of music, but also basic human functions like speaking and listening.

They’re doing it with their books, their TV shows, and their games, too. Developmentally appropriate material is important for learning that category of art or culture, and provides a basis to build on after that.

Property costs money to maintain. And it can only earn as much as someone is willing to pay for it, so if everyone’s poor they won’t pay enough rent to make up for the holding cost.

But they might be able to hope for the selling price in the future to be worth a lot, right? Unless it looks like they have to lock up their money in that investment, doing nothing, for a decade or more while other investments (stocks, bonds, etc.) do much better.

Investing in real estate is tricky, especially at scale. A mistake can cost a huge percentage of the investment, if not wiping out the investment on specific properties.

Or the economy crashes to the point where prices drop and the fed lowers interest rates to try to stimulate the economy, but the economy is so bad that you don’t have a job to be able to qualify for a loan.

Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.

That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.

No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.

The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.

In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.

Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.

Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG

I’ve read the article. It goes into detail in the stats across the entire generation. It talks about the big rise in both median and average household wealth for millennials between 2019 and 2022. It also acknowledges that the gap between 20th percentile and 80th percentile for millennials has grown to the largest in history for any generation.

It’s the rise in house prices and the stock market. For millennials who already owned that stuff before the pandemic, and in a position to take advantage of the huge salary gains from the great resignation, the last 5 years have been a financial boon.

I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.

One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.

The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.

I think that some people had trouble with the raised angle of the hostel smile photo, and the way that cameras of different focal lengths (technically, more a function of distance between camera and subject) tend to flatten three dimensional features in slightly different ways. The posts where people were saying that various pictures don’t look like the same person, but like you, I think they look pretty similar.

Way too many birds.

But also I need to know about the maids a milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a leaping, pipers piping, and the drummers drumming. Like, this is a performance where the humans get paid and get to go home afterward, and not like a slave trade situation, right?

That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.

There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.

And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).