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.

Don’t paparazzi make plenty of money off of selling unauthorized photos of celebrities? Celebrities can control some uses of their likeness, but not all of them.

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).

Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.

Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won’t be able to live.

If there’s a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they’re incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they’ve accumulated up to that point.

So no, I don’t think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.

I didn’t think I’d ever agree with Hawley

Hawley represents the future of the Republican party, in my opinion: populist conservatism that is willing to bend on party orthodoxy on how taxes and regulations shouldn’t be captured by big corporate interests, but is just completely abhorrent on cultural issues (and whether the government should be involved in those issues).

In an earlier political era, there would be opportunities for cross-party dialogue on the issues that the parties have deemed non-partisan (where divisions don’t fall within party lines and party leadership doesn’t care that their members hold a diversity of views on), but the number of issues that fall within that category have plummeted in the last 20 years.

Along the same lines, from the same writer/creator, Armando Iannucci, there’s The Death of Stalin. The absurdity of how the inner circle navigated the politics around Stalin, including after his death, is hilarious but also a good look at how these power dynamics work in an authoritarian, despotic government.

Or also from Iannucci, Avenue 5, which basically is set in the future where all of this political nonsense continues, and is in the background of a comedy about a space cruise ship.

Republicans killed a COVID era $3600/year child tax credit, letting it lapse in 2023 back to the 2018 amount of $2000, which was increased from $1000 as a replacement for the $5050 tax exemption parents used to be able to get before the 2017 Trump tax reforms. For a married couple whose combined income was between $75k and $150k, that $5k tax exemption was worth about $1250, so it was a bad trade for them (or anyone making more).

If Republicans were serious about financially incentivizing having children, they’ll need to support the kids throughout the entire life cycle: healthcare for pregnant women, including through labor and deliver and post partum, support for families with young children (including parental leave mandates), subsidized daycare, good schools, parks and libraries, and economic stability (including in housing costs).

But they’re not, so here we are.

school gun team

This fucking country, man.

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.

The marijuana smile cross skull is actually symbolism for 👊🇺🇸🔥which means “prayers up for our troops” and “we are currently clean on OPSEC.”

Seriously. It’s like looking at a map of a battle and assuming the arrows are actual terrain features.

The topic of the original posted screenshot is about inter-generational financial advice. I’m pointing out the need for intellectual humility when talking to a younger generation, by identifying a specific cognitive bias that tends to trip people up. And because this particular bias forms through experience, it tends to apply more to people with longer experience (that is, people who are older).

I thought my original comment wasn’t judgmental, and didn’t even purport to claim that all (or most) old people actually fall victim to the bias, to where they’re acting upon that bias. I’m just pointing out that it’s something to look out for, and to keep in mind, if you’re ever in the position to be giving younger generations financial advice.

Coming in here and trying to defend old people against an imagined attack is, frankly, off topic and not particularly helpful.

“Blame” means to attribute for some negative result. There’s no assigning fault here, just an observation, and an explanation behind that observation.

If I said “Bob is a fucking idiot,” that’s not blaming Bob for anything.

So yeah, I stand by my explanation behind the observation in OP’s screenshot: that people tend to draw on past experiences even when those experiences are no longer as relevant, or are even actively misleading. And that the phenomenon I describe (that not all prices inflate at the same rate or preserve the same ratios to each other) exacerbates the problem.

Please stop blaming “old people”.

I’m not “blaming” anyone. I’m pointing out the mechanism that causes a portion of old people to be out of touch on these things. They rely on their own experiences to draw inferences that don’t actually apply to others.

There’s a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she’d be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month’s rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month’s salary of a factory worker.

That’s the real problem with old people’s sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn’t possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.

The poverty line was historically measured simply by multiplying the USDA’s cheapest food plan for a household to buy groceries with adequate nutrition, and multiplying by 3.

Then, in the intervening 6 decades or so, food inflation has gone up significantly slower than housing inflation, to where that simple assumption of “barely enough to eat, times 3” began systematically understating actual poverty.

Today, feeding the reference family of 4 (2 adults 20-50, 1 kid aged 6-8, 1 aged 9-11) costs $996.20 per month (as of March 2025). That’s basically $12,000 per year, so the poverty line for a family of 4 is $32,150 (updated every January with September data).

Their tattoos?

They also know hurting themselves.

Well we already lost that in 2022, when it dropped back down to a $2000 annual credit you get when you do your taxes the year after, and after this year it’ll drop again to $1000 unless the law is changed.